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Chapter I
How the Chevalier Tannhäuser entered into
the Hill of Venus
The Chevalier Tannhäuser, having lighted off
his horse, stood doubtfully for a moment beneath the ombre gateway
of the Venusberg, troubled with an exquisite fear lest a day’s
travel should have too cruelly undone the laboured niceness of his
dress. His hand, slim and gracious as La Marquise du Deffand’s
in the drawing by Carmontelle, played nervously about the gold hair
that fell upon his shoulders like a finely-curled peruke, and from
point to point of a precise toilet the fingers wandered, quelling
the little mutinies of cravat and ruffle.
It was taper-time; when the tired
earth puts on its cloak of mists and shadows, when the enchanted
woods are stirred with light footfalls and slender voices of the
fairies, when all the air is full of delicate influences, and even
the beaux, seated at their dressing-tables, dream a little.
A delicious moment, thought Tannhäuser,
to slip into exile.
The place where he stood waved drowsily
with strange flowers, heavy with perfume, dripping with odours.
Gloomy and nameless weeds not to be found in Mentzelius. Huge moths,
so richly winged they must have banqueted upon tap-estries and royal
stuffs, slept on the pillars that flanked either side of the gateway,
and the eyes of all the moths remained open and were burning and
bursting with a mesh of veins. The pillars were fashioned in some
pale stone and rose up like hymns in the praise of pleasure, for
from cap to base, each one was carved with loving sculptures, showing
such a cunning invention and such a curious knowledge, that Tannhäuser
lingered not a little in reviewing them. They surpassed all that
Japan has ever pictured from her maisons vertes, all that was ever
painted in the cool bathrooms of Cardinal La Motte, and even outdid
the astonishing illustrations to Jones’s Nursery Numbers.
“A pretty portal,” murmured the
Chevalier, correcting his sash.
As he spoke, a faint sound of singing was
breathed out from the mountain, faint music as strange and distant
as sea-legends that are heard in shells.
“The Vespers of Venus, I take it,”
said Tannhäuser, and struck a few chords of accompaniment,
ever so lightly, upon his little lute. Softly across the spell-bound
threshold the song floated and wreathed itself about the subtle
columns, till the moths were touched with passion and moved quaintly
in their sleep. One of them was awakened by the intenser notes of
the Chevalier’s lute-strings, and fluttered into the cave.
Tannhäuser felt it was his cue for entry.
“Adieu,” he exclaimed with an
inclusive gesture, “and goodbye, Madonna,” as the cold
circle of the moon began to show, beautiful and full of enchantments.
There was a shadow of sentiment in his voice as he spoke the words.
“Would to heaven,” he sighed,
“I might receive the assurance of a looking-glass before I
make my debut! However, as she is a goddess, I doubt not her eyes
are a little sated with perfection, and may not be displeased to
see it crowned with a tiny fault.”
A wild rose had caught upon the trimmings
of his ruff, and in the first flush of displeasure he would have
struck it brusquely away and most severely punished the offending
flower. But the ruffled mood lasted only a moment, for there was
something so deliciously incongruous in the hardy petal’s invasion
of so delicate a thing that Tannhäuser withheld the finger
of resentment, and vowed that the wild rose should stay where it
had clung—a passport, as it were, from the upper to the lower
world.
“The very excess and violence of the
fault,” he said, “will be its excuse”; and, undoing
a tangle in the tassel of his stick, stepped into the shadowy corridor
that ran into the bosom of the wan hill—stepped with the admirable
aplomb and unwrinkled suavity of Don John.
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