Page 52 of Passion Painted in a Lady's Heart
“Rosalind, what were you doing in such a place? Do you know how many people saw you?” her father exclaimed, folding his periodical and tossing it onto the table.
“But why does it matter? I went to see the paintings. You know I love art,” Rosalind replied.
“Art? That’s not art. It’s filth. Nude paintings…the female form…unspeakable acts,” her mother exclaimed.
The two footmen standing at either ends of the sideboard blushed, their lips trembling, as though they were about to burst out laughing. Rosalind rolled her eyes.
“It’s hardly like that, mother,” she replied, but she knew the duchess would never see it in the same way.
To her mother, those paintings only represented a moral degeneracy in society. She was not a committed churchgoer, but her sensibilities were puritanical in this regard, and it seemed Rosalind’s father agreed.
“And to view these abominations on the arm of a man, the man we’ve forbidden you from having anything to do with,” he exclaimed, shaking his head.
Her mother had begun to sob, pulling out her handkerchief and dabbing at her eyes.
“I can only imagine what the Duke of Northridge will say. You’ve disgraced yourself, Rosalind, disgraced yourself!” she cried, and now the two footmen could not fail to disguise their amusement.
Rosalind had heard enough, and she rose to her feet, intent on retreating to her bedroom, angry at having been the subject of such idle gossip on the part of her mother’s friends.
“You always take other people’s side against me. You make me out to be at the center of a scandal. But it wasn’t like that. I was invited to the exhibition by Lord Cuthbert. He and Elizabeth are courting. Sebastian, the Earl of Southbourne, was there. He appreciates art as I do. He invited me to see the other paintings. I accepted. Then we went to Gunter’s for ices,” Rosalind replied, fixing her parents with a defiant gaze.
Her mother let out a wail.
“Gunter’s? Oh, for ices? Oh, you didn’t, Rosalind. You’re betrothed to Richard. What’s he going to say when he finds out?” she exclaimed, but Rosalind was past caring.
“He can say what he likes for all I care. I don’t want anything to do with him or with you,” she said, and turning on her heels, she marched out of the dining room, slamming the door behind her.
On the stairs, she paused, catching her breath, and knowing she would regret was she had just said. But in the heat of the moment, she had told the truth about how she felt and was angry at the way everything she might want or not want was supposed for her.
“Why can’t they just let me be happy?” she asked herself, for on Sebastian’s arm, in his company, she had been, if only for a few fleeting moments.
***
When Sebastian awoke, he was still in the artist’s studio at the top of the house by the sea, caught up in the dream of Rosalind, in whose arms he had spent the night.
But opening his eyes, he found himself in the gloom of his bedroom, a thin shaft of light coming through a gap in the curtain, and the true memory of the previous night now returned to him. His stomach still had a dull ache to it, and sitting up in bed, he poured himself a drink from a jug of water on his bedside.
“What a dream, but what a waking reality,” he thought to himself.
A dream was like a painting. One could gaze at it, inhabit it, even, but there always came a point when it was torn away, snatched by the necessity of a return to the world as it was, rather than what it might be.
But as he got up, Sebastian’s mind lingered on his dream of Rosalind in the nude. She was the subject of his painting, but not only by imagination. In his dream, she had been there in front of him, allowing him to paint her as she truly was.
“And insisting on my being the same,” he said to himself, smiling, as he gazed at his naked form in the mirror.
After getting dressed, Sebastian’s mind turned to more practical matters, and he thought back to the events of the evening before. His mind was lucid now, sleep having eased the turmoil, and he thought again about the painting, and the strange circumstances of its having been altered.
“I know I didn’t change it. Just like I know I didn’t mislay the cigar case,” he told himself, adamant in his own recollection, even as events surrounding it told a different story.
As he went down to breakfast, his mind was made up. He would resist his madness with all his might, and would not be turned into an invalid, despite what both his stepmother and uncle might think. He found them both in the dining room eating toast and marmalade, and as he entered, they looked up at him with concerned expressions.
“How did you sleep?” Lady Soutbourne asked.
“Very soundly, thank you,” Sebastian replied.
He noticed his uncle had taken the chair once occupied by Sebastian’s father. After his death, Sebastian had made a point of not sitting there, not wishing to think of himself as having replaced his father or cast his memory aside.
“That’s something, then. And I’m sure the doctor’s remedy will help, too. Madness can’t be stopped, but its symptoms can be alleviated to a certain extent. Those so afflicted need proper understanding. Treatment is only part of the solution,” Sebastian’s uncle said.
