“Wurst found him charming. He has Russian blood himself, and had known the composer. He has encouraged Antoine’s revolutionary tendencies from the first. The pair of them took the last concert so completely out of my hands that it seemed fruitless to remain.”
“Bébé forgot himself,” pronounced M. Lemaure, still quite at ease. Indeed the situation so reminded him of Antoine’s childhood that he longed to laugh. “What did he say, and when?”
“We will not revive it,” said Lucien. “When he came to his senses, he apologized sufficiently. Perhaps he was not well ... when is the first engagement—Sunday?”
“Let him be for a time. There is no harm.”
Lucien grunted. “I shall not disturb him while he is seasick, if that is what you mean. It would do him no harm to play scales all the week.”
“Scales—as you will, but not persons. Not Dmitri Tschedin, I mean, nor even me. It is intrusive personality, always, that disturbs the current of Antoine’s philosophy.”
“Father! How absurd.”
“But I have long remarked it. His own individuality fights the alien matter, and it is not till he has either rejected it or absorbed that he is steady again. Wurst and his Russians have excited him—nothing more natural. For me,” said M. Lemaure, plunging into memory, as he stood by his son’s side at the window, “at his age, the realm of music did not hold such petulant passions, any more than it held flat heresy, like that of Sorbier and Duchâtel.”
“Antoine adores Duchâtel,” remarked Lucien. “There is no fighting there.”
“Bon!” The old man laughed. “Heresy on the hearth then, if it must be so. So long as he does not play the stuff in my hearing.”