“Give you another toast, you noisy old savage!” repeated Zack, “I’ll give you five, all at once! Mr. Blyth, Mrs. Blyth, Madonna, Columbus, and The Golden Age—three excellent people and two glorious pictures; let’s lump them all together, in a friendly way, and drink long life and success to them in beakers of fragrant grog!” shouted the young gentleman, making perilously rapid progress through his second glass, as he spoke.
“Do you know, I’m afraid I must change to some other place, if you have no objection,” said Mr. Blyth, after he had duly honored the composite toast just proposed. “The fire here, behind me, is getting rather too hot.”
“Change along with me,” said Mat. “I don’t mind heat, nor cold neither, for the matter of that.”
Valentine accepted this offer with great gratitude. “By-the-bye, Zack,” he said, placing himself comfortably in his host’s chair, between the table and the wall—“I was going to ask a favor of our excellent friend here, when you suggested that wonderful and matchless trial of strength which we have just had. You have been of such inestimable assistance to me already, my dear sir,” he continued, turning towards Mat, with all his natural cordiality of disposition now fully developed, under the fostering influence of the Squaw’s Mixture. “You have laid me under such an inexpressible obligation in saving my picture from destruction—”
“I wish you could make up your mind to say what you want in plain words,” interrupted Mat. “I’m one of your rough-handed, thick-headed sort, I am. I’m not gentleman enough to understand parlarver. It don’t do me no good: it only worrits me into a perspiration.” And Mat, shaking down his shirt-sleeve, drew it several times across his forehead, as a proof of the truth of his last assertion.
“Quite right! quite right!” cried Mr. Blyth, patting him on the shoulder in the most friendly manner imaginable. “In plain words, then, when I mentioned, just now, how much I admired your arms in an artistic point of view, I was only paving the way for asking you to let me make a drawing of them, in black and white, for a large picture that I mean to paint later in the year. My classical figure composition, you know, Zack—you have seen the sketch—Hercules bringing to Eurystheus the Erymanthian boar—a glorious subject; and our friend’s arms, and, indeed, his chest, too, if he would kindly consent to sit for it, would make the very studies I most want for Hercules.”
“What on earth is he driving at?” asked Mat, addressing himself to young Thorpe, after staring at Valentine for a moment or two in a state of speechless amazement.
“He wants to draw your arms—of course you will be only too happy to let him—you can’t understand anything about it now—but you will when you begin to sit—pass the cigars—thank Blyth for meaning to make a Hercules of you-and tell him you’ll come to the painting-room whenever he likes,” answered Zack, joining his sentences together in his most offhand manner, all in a breath.
“What painting-room? Where is it?” asked Mat, still in a densely stupefied condition.
“My painting-room,” replied Valentine. “Where you saw the pictures, and saved Columbus, yesterday.”