Chandra sat down in the chair opposite her father.
“Why did Mama not like him?”
“She thought him a rather domineering, aggressive young man, which he certainly was in those days.”
“And now?”
“He has no need to be aggressive, but he is domineering just by being himself.”
It was Chandra’s turn to laugh.
“You are describing him very eloquently, Papa. Go on!”
“I really don’t know what else to tell you,” he said. “He came into the title when he was quite young, but does not use it. He prefers to call himself ‘Damon Frome’ unless he wants to pull strings to get his own way. That, I imagine is what he has done on this occasion, to gain entry into Nepal.”
“But why is he particularly interested in Sanskrit?”
The Professor shrugged his shoulders.
“I have no idea! It certainly seems a strange interest for a young man, but he undoubtedly has collected a number of extremely valuable manuscripts in the past, mostly from Tibet, and as you know over the years, he has sent me quite a number to translate.”
“When they have been translated, what does he do with them?”
“He publishes them and I receive a certain amount of royalties from the books if they sell, which they do not in any appreciable number.”
“I think he sounds rather mysterious,” Chandra said. “How old is he, Papa?”
The Professor gave a shrug of his shoulders.
“Thirty-three – thirty-four – thirty-five – I really have no idea. He is one of those men who might be any age. I can only estimate he must still be young, because he was only a mere boy when we first met.”
“But he is rich?”
“Very rich, I believe. Most such men of his age are enjoying themselves in London, as members of the ‘Marlborough House Set’, racing at Newmarket, trying to win the Derby, grouse shooting in Scotland or yachting at Cowes.”
Chandra clapped her hands.
“Oh, Papa! You are such fun! You always behave as if your head is in the clouds, but when it comes down to brass tacks you know a great deal more than you pretend to about the Social world.”
“A world in which I have no interest and have never been able to afford,” the Professor replied. “Your mother would have enjoyed it when we were young, although I don’t think she really missed it.”
“Mama missed nothing when she was with you. If you had asked her to live on the moon, she would have made the best of it and I suspect would have made it quite comfortable.”
“That is true,” the Professor agreed. “Although we suffered a great deal of discomfort one way or another, we always managed to laugh at life because we just liked being together.”
“I was there too,” Chandra reminded him in a small voice.
“I know, my dearest, and we thought you were the most entrancing child any two people could have, even though we were disappointed at only having one. But I doubt if we could have afforded any more.”
“You certainly could not have taken more than one over deserts, across India and all those other strange places we visited.”
The Professor gave a sigh.
“I am always glad that your mother had her last years here. She always longed to have a home.”
“She made it a very happy one,” Chandra said. “Even now when I come into the house, I expect to hear her voice saying, ‘Is that you, darling?’”
She saw a sudden mist over her father’s eyes and wished that she had not spoken.
Then, as if it suddenly struck him, he asked,
“You will be all right while I am gone?”
“Ellen will be with me.”
“I hope I will not be too long.”
“I hope so too, Papa. I shall miss you, so you had better give me plenty of work to do.”
“There is still quite a lot left undone on the latest manuscripts from the Royal Asiatic Society,” the Professor remarked.
“Yes, of course,” Chandra agreed, “so I will get down to them. But it will not be the same, Papa, as working with you.”
The Professor rose to his feet.
“If it was anyone else but Frome,” he said, “I would damn the consequences and say you had to come with me, but he is such an unpredictable man. I believe his reply would be that he would get somebody else.”
“And that would break your heart, Papa, you know it would!” Chandra exclaimed. “Never mind, I will follow you in my thoughts, and I shall pray every day that you really will find the Lotus Manuscript and bring it back for me to see.”
“Then, with another six hundred pounds in our pockets, we will celebrate,” the Professor said, “and you shall have everything you want. That I promise you!”
Chandra rose from the seat and put her arms round her father to kiss him once again.
“You will take care of yourself, Papa, will you not?” she pleaded. “I will be very uneasy with Ellen worrying about you all the time.”
“If Ellen had her way, I would be in a wheelchair! All women, whatever their age, like an invalid so that they can bully him!”
Chandra laughed.
Then she said,
“Now I’m going to the attic and I don’t mind betting you, Papa, that I shall find Ellen there already. You know whatever she says aloud, in her heart she is very proud of your achievements, just as I am.”
“That is what your mother used to say and I would so much like to find the Lotus Manuscript if only because she would have been so pleased.”
“If you do find it, Papa, I shall believe it is because she has helped you to do so.”
Now she walked resolutely towards the door, knowing that although it was so fascinating to stay talking to her father, there was a great deal for her to do.
As she walked up the stairs, she thought wistfully of the fun it would be if only she could go with him as she had been on their trips in the past.
Looking back, she thought they had always seemed filled with laughter, even when there were catastrophes like when one of their mules carrying a load of precious possessions had fallen over a precipice to be lost in the valley below.
It had all been part of an adventure, just as when they were becalmed for days on end in a small ship travelling in the Red Sea and they had run out of water.
Chandra could look back on innumerable instances which might have made another person cry, but her mother had always managed to smile.
“It might be worse,” she would say. “After all, we are all alive and well and so far the mast has not broken on our heads or a crocodile eaten us!”
It was her mother who made her father comfortable in the most impossible places. It was her mother who seemed somehow to provide food when they were tired and inclined to be disagreeable. Her mother, who surrounded her father with an aura of love, which made it impossible, however poor they were, to be anything but happy.
‘Papa always had Mama to look after him,’ Chandra thought, ‘and after she died, Ellen and I have done our best! I don’t really believe that he could manage without us.’
She had an uncomfortable conviction that this was the truth. Then she asked herself what could she do about it.
It would not only make her father happy to go on this journey to Nepal, it would also settle the immediate problem of their financial difficulties. There was no money left in the bank with which they could purchase even the merest necessities of life.
‘It is providential that it has happened at this moment,’ Chandra told herself.
She took off the small hat she had been wearing and, walking into her bedroom, laid it down on a chair.
It was still too hot to need a coat, and she thought that her gown which was faded from many washings and pressings, was in fact very shabby.
Perhaps it was a good thing that she had not gone into the study to speak to Lord Frome, even though she would have liked to meet him.
He might have thought that he would obtain the Profe
ssor more cheaply because it was obvious that his daughter was badly in need of a new dress.
Then she told herself that she was attributing quite unfair qualities to the man she should be looking on as a benefactor.
After all, he had been very generous in his treatment of her father and had certainly anticipated that he would need money on the train journey across India.
That, at any rate, was sensible, Chandra told herself a little grudgingly, then smiled because she knew she was resenting Lord Frome simply because he was the type of man of whom her father could not ask a favour.
‘He is taking Papa away from me and I think really I hate him for that!’ she told her reflection in the mirror.
Then because she sounded so serious, she smiled.
“A woman hater!” she said aloud. “If only he was not one, it might have made all the difference to my life!”
CHAPTER TWO
Chandra came downstairs carrying yet more items to add to the large pile of luggage already assembled in the hall.
She had always thought it was easy to travel light, but she had found instead that her father required so many things that she had already teased him by saying he would need a special elephant to carry them.
A number of them were of course, essential to his work and he would have been lost without them, just as he would not have thought of going off anywhere without a number of books to read.
He was determined to know a great deal about Nepal before he reached it.
It was one of the few places in the East that he had not visited in the past and he and Chandra found that they were absorbed by what they could learn from the numerous books which filled the study walls from floor to ceiling.
The majority of course were out of date, but there were a number relating to the past history of the Monarchy of Nepal. They learnt that since 1857 power had rested with the Prime Minister, while the King was only the symbolic head of the country.
It all sounded fascinating, but as far as Chandra was concerned there were so many other things to be done that she could only glance at her father’s books and listen to what he told her in the evenings when the work was done.
Now that he was leaving she found herself thinking continually of Ellen’s anxiety about him and, although the maid said very little, Chandra was aware that she thought it unlikely her father would survive the journey.
Sometimes in the darkness Chandra would find herself talking to her mother and asking her advice.
“What am I to do, Mama?” she would ask. “You know how much Papa is looking forward to finding the Lotus Manuscript and also we need the money. We need it desperately and it is really a gift from the Gods that Lord Frome should have turned up at this exact moment.”
She felt her mother understood and yet the worrying doubt if she was doing the right thing in letting her father leave was always with her.
Not, she told herself, that she would have been able to stop him. There was only one person who had ever been able to alter her father’s mind once he had made it up and that had been her mother.
‘He will go if it kills him!’ she told herself over and over again.
Then she thought that perhaps if such a tragedy did happen it would be the way that her father would want to die.
Today the last things that Ellen and she felt necessary for her father’s comfort had been cleaned, his clothes washed and pressed and, as Chandra added what she carried in her hands, she thought that really must be enough.
Tomorrow they would have one more day together and she wanted to spend every moment in her father’s company, before they would have to leave very early next morning to reach Southampton.
Chandra was determined to go with him and see him on board and make his cabin as comfortable as possible.
‘I will take some roses with me,’ she thought, ‘and they will remind him of home as he passes through the Bay of Biscay which is certain to be rough.’
She walked across the hall and into the study where, as she expected, her father was at his desk working.
“What are you doing now, Papa?” she asked.
“I’m just polishing up my knowledge of the Nepalese language,” he told her.
“It is different from Urdu?” Chandra enquired.
“The Newari language is related to the Tibetan and Burmese,” the Professor replied, “and retains a monosyllabic character. It does not have a script of its own, but has adopted Sanskrit and modified it to its own needs.”
“I think I did know that,” Chandra replied, “but will you find it difficult to understand Newari?”
“I hope not. As you know, I speak so many different languages and dialects that I expect I shall make myself understood.”
Chandra leaned over his shoulder and looked at the words he was writing down and realised that he was translating the more ordinary sentences that he might require.
She made her father pronounce one or two of them to her, then repeated them after him.
“It’s not too difficult for us because we can read Sanskrit,” he said, “but I imagine a complete foreigner to the country would find it extremely hard.”
Chandra gave a little sigh.
“Oh, Papa, I do wish I was coming with you! There are so many things we could do together which would be amusing.”
Her father sighed too.
“I know, my dearest, but I assure you that Lord Frome would be horrified at such an idea! I am sure he would take somebody else and want his money back.”
Chandra held up her hands in horror.
“Don’t suggest such a thing! The whole village is celebrating because we have paid our debts! They have not felt so affluent for years!”
“It’s lucky I have not had to buy any new equipment,” the Professor said, “so I shall not have to worry about you and Ellen not having enough money while I am away.”
“You are the one we have to worry about.”
Chandra put her arm around his shoulders and said,
“Stop working, Papa, I want you to spend every moment until tomorrow with me. Why do we not walk in the garden? It’s a lovely warm day and the air will do you good.”
“Very well, my dear. I will just put these books back on the shelf so that I can find them when next I want them.”
“I will help you,” Chandra offered.
She picked up a number of books that her father had thrown carelessly on the floor and carried them across the room.
She tried to arrange the volumes he used frequently in some sort of order, so that they did not waste time in looking for a book when they wanted it.
But there were so many, and they covered such a wide range of different countries and subjects, that however hard she tried, she usually found that the book she wanted quickly was one that had been moved to some inaccessible spot.
Chandra put those she carried in her arms tidily in place, then turned to see that her father was climbing the stepladder to place some books he had been reading on one of the top shelves.
“Let me do that, Papa,” she said.
But he was already standing on the top of the steps, slipping the books into place.
Only as he put the last one in, did he murmur something that Chandra could not hear and, as she looked at him questioningly, he seemed to sway.
“Papa!” she cried out, but even as she spoke she realised that he was falling.
He clutched at the side of the bookcase, then, as his feet seemed to slip, he half-fell, half-slithered, from the steps onto the ground.
He pulled Chandra down with him and she undoubtedly prevented his fall from being as hard as it might have been.
“Oh, Papa!” she said again and realised that with his eyes shut he was breathing laboriously while his hand had gone to his heart.
She knew what had happened and that the doctor’s forebodings had come true. Her father had had a heart attack.
With difficulty she moved him into a more comfortable position, reaching from behind her
for a cushion from the chair to put under his head.
Then, rising to her feet, she ran to the door and opening it, shouted,
“Ellen! Ellen!”
Her voice seemed to ring out round the small house and the old maid came hurrying from the kitchen.
“What is it, Miss Chandra?”
“It’s Papa! I think he has had a heart attack. We must send for the doctor!”
“There’s a boy at the back door with some groceries,” Ellen replied, “I’ll send him.”
She hurried away and Chandra ran back to her father.
She knew there was very little she could do. She undid his tie and loosened his collar, then felt his heart.
She was not experienced enough to know if it was irregular, but at least he was alive and that for the moment was all that mattered.
*
It was more than two hours later when the doctor came down the staircase with Chandra at his side.
“Your father is a lucky man,” he said. “It was not a bad attack. Shall we say it is a warning and he must be very much more careful in the future.”
They reached the hall and he looked at the pile of luggage.
“I am afraid your father will be disappointed that he cannot go to Nepal,” he said, “as a journey of any sort is out of the question.”
Chandra did not speak and he paused before he added,
“Unless of course, he could spend the winter in a warm climate like the South of France.”
He smiled and put his hand on Chandra’s arm.
“I know, my dear, that is impossible, but I have just ordered that exact treatment for our Lord Lieutenant.”
“Is Lord Dorritt ill?” Chandra enquired.
“He suffers from a combination of too rich living and not enough to do,” the doctor smiled, “although perhaps it is indiscreet of me to say so.”
“That is something you could not accuse Papa of,” Chandra replied.
“No, and it’s a pity they cannot change places,” the doctor answered. “If your father could spend the winter in the warm sunshine and Lord Dorritt had as much work as the Professor manages to get through, they might both be healthier and longer-living men.”
Love in the Clouds Page 3