Love and the Loathsome Leopard by Barbara Cartland Read Free Book Online Page A

been his father’s.
    For a moment he felt as though the walls swam in front of his eyes.
    He could hear his father’s voice rising, storming at him for some petty or imaginary offence until he worked himself into such a frenzy that the only way he could relieve his feelings was to thrash his son almost insensible.
    For a moment Lord Cheriton held his breath, waiting for the past to envelop him with all the resentment and searing agony that had haunted him for years after leaving home.
    Then the sunshine pouring in through the windows dispersed the expected darkness and he saw instead of the Devil’s Chamber a very pleasant room with a painted ceiling.
    It had been done by Italian craftsmen on his great grandfather’s instructions at the end of the seventeenth century. The carved four-poster bed was of an earlier date and had a beautiful embroidered satin cover.
    There were roses standing on the carved dressing table, and the curtains, which had originally been crimson, were a soft warm pink.
    Lord Cheriton stood looking round him.
    Was this the room which, like the library, had haunted him for so many years until the only solace he could find in the memory of it was to envisage it in ruins, the ceiling crumbling on a dirty floor, the windows pane-less, the four-poster broken?
    “This was the Master bedroom,” Wivina was saying, “and is in fact in better repair than any other room. I think you will be comfortable here.”
    “I am sure I shall,” Lord Cheriton replied. “Have you taken such trouble with the other eighty rooms you told me this house possesses?”
    “The top floor is uninhabitable,” Wivina answered, “and because the rains come in, the ceilings of a great many of the bedrooms on this floor have fallen.”
    She gave a little sigh.
    “We have tried to move the best furniture out of them, but we never know which one will go next.”
    There was a pain in her voice which he had perceived before and Lord Cheriton asked curiously,
    “Why does it mean so much to you?”
    “It is my home,” Wivina said simply, “and I love all things that are beautiful.”
    She glanced at him a little nervously before she added,
    “Perhaps you will think it very reprehensible of me, but I sleep in what was Lady Cheriton’s room. It is so lovely. Every day I pray that I can go on sleeping there and it will not be taken from me.”
    “And you are afraid Lord Cheriton might do that?”
    “Not only – Lord Cheriton,” she said with a little throb in her voice.
    She turned away as she spoke and moved towards the door.
    Then, as she reached it, she said,
    “You asked to see the house. There is very little else to show you on this floor except for my room and Richard’s.”
    “Then may I see them?”
    He thought she hesitated a moment as if she thought he was intruding on something personal.
    Then she seemed to decide he had the right to do so and waited for him.
    They went out into the passage and she opened the door of the room that had been his mother’s.
    The sunshine made it for a moment difficult for him to see. He almost expected to hear his mother’s voice speaking to him and to see her rise from the chair by the fireplace where she had always sat and hold out her arms.
    It was decorated in blue, which he thought now was the same colour as Wivina’s eyes, and he saw at once how carefully she had repaired the curtains at the sides of the windows and those that fell from a corona over the bed.
    It had always been a room of perfect taste, the furniture delicately inlaid, the gilt mirrors carved with flowers and cupids.
    “It is so lovely,” he heard Wivina say beside him, “that when I am here I can shut the door and forget all the things that – worry and – frighten me.”
    “Are there many of them?” Lord Cheriton asked.
    He saw the darkness in her eyes and knew that she was like a small animal frantically trying to escape from its pursuers and yet anticipating that it might be impossible.
    Because