A few weeks later they were married; and in that lonely little cottage she would have been bored to death but for the tawdry future that she foresaw. The man's dream of awakening her tenderness was speedily dispelled; he had been accepted as the means to an end, and he was held fast to the compact. She grudged him every hour in which he idled by her side. Driven from her arms by her impatience, old Bourjac would toil patiently in the workroom: planning, failing—surmounting obstacles atom by atom, for the sake of a woman whose sole interest in his existence was his progress with the Illusion that was to gratify her vanity.
He worshipped her still. If he had not worshipped her, he would sooner or later have renounced the scheme as impracticable; only his love for her supported him in the teeth of the impediments that arose. Of these she heard nothing. For one reason, her interest was so purely selfish that she had not even wished to learn how the cabinet was to be constructed. "All those figures gave her a headache," she declared. For another, when early in the winter he had owned himself at a deadlock, she had sneered at him as a duffer who was unable to fulfil his boasts. Old Bourjac never forgot that—his reputation was very dear to him—he did not speak to her of his difficulties again.
But they often talked of the success she was to achieve. She liked to go into a corner of the parlour and rehearse the entrance that she would make to acknowledge the applause. "It will be the great moment," she would say, "when I reappear as myself and bow."
"No, it will be expected; that will not surprise anybody," Bourjac would insist. "The climax, the last effect, will be the skeleton!"
It was the skeleton that caused him the most anxious thought of all. In order to compass it, he almost feared that he would be compelled to sacrifice one of the preceding scenes. The babe, the girl, the matron, the crone, for all these his mechanism provided; but the skeleton, the "last effect," baffled his ingenuity. Laure began to think his task eternal.
Ever since the wedding, she had dilated proudly to her mother and Legrand on her approaching début, and it angered her that she could never say when the début was to be. Now that there need be no question of his marrying her, Legrand's manner towards her had become more marked. She went to the house often. One afternoon, when she rang, the door was opened by him; he explained that the old woman was out marketing.
Laure waited in the kitchen, and the conjurer sat on the table, talking to her.
"How goes the Illusion?" he asked.
"Oh, big!" she said. "It's going to knock them, I can tell you!" Her laugh was rather derisive. "It's a rum world; the shop-girl will become an artist, with a show that draws all Paris. We expect to open at the Folies-Bergère." She knew that Legrand could never aspire to an engagement at the Folies-Bergère as long as he lived.
"I hope you will make a hit," he said, understanding her resentment perfectly.