He had the handsomest studio in New York, a studio for one of Ouida's heroes to luxuriate in. If the encouragement of picturesque surroundings could have made a painter of him he would have been a master. The fame of his studio, and the fact that he did not need the money, made his pictures sell. He was quite a lion in society, and it was regarded as a favor to be asked to call on him. He was the beau ideal of the artist of romance, and was accorded a romantic eminence accordingly[aa]. So, with his pictures to provide him with pocket money, and his father to see to the rest, he lived the life of a young prince, feted and flattered and spoiled, artistically despised by all the serious workers who knew him, and hated by some who envied him the commercial success he had no necessity for, but esteemed by most of us as a good fellow and his own worst enemy.
Frank married his first wife while Dobb senior was still at the helm of his own affairs. She was a charming little woman whose acquaintance he had made when she visited his studio with a party of friends. She had not a penny, but he made a draft upon "the governor," as he called him, and the happy pair digested their honeymoon in Europe. They were absent six months, during which time he did not set brush to canvas. Then they returned, as he fancifully termed it, to go to work.
He commenced the old life as if he had never been married. The familiar sound of pipes and beer, and supper after the play, often with young ladies who had been assisting in the representation on the stage, was traveled as if there had been no Mrs. Dobb at home in the flat old Dobb provided. Frank's expenditures on himself were as lavish as they had been in his bachelor days. As little Brown said, it was lucky that Mrs. Dobb had a father-in-law to buy her dinner for her. She rarely came to her husband's studio, because he claimed that it interfered with the course of business. He had invented a fiction that she was too weak to endure the strain of society, and so he took her into it as little as possible. In brief, married by the caprice of a selfish man, the poor little woman lived through a couple of neglected years, and then died of a malady as nearly akin to a broken heart as I can think of, while Frank was making a trip to the Bahamas on the yacht of his friend Munnybagge, of the Stock Exchange.
He had set out on the voyage ostensibly to make studies, for he was a marine painter, on the principle, probably, that marines are easiest to paint. When he came back and found his wife dead, he announced that he would move his studio to Havana for the purpose of improving his art. He did so, putting off his mourning suit the day after he left New York and not putting it on again, as the evidence of creditable witnesses on the steamer and in Havana has long since proved.
His son's callousness was a savage stab in old Dobb's heart. A little, mild-looking old gentleman, without a taint of selfishness or suspicion in his own nature, he had not seen the effect of his indulgence of him on his son till his brutal disregard for his first duty as a man had told him of it. The old man had appreciated and loved his daughter-in-law. In proportion as he had discovered her unhappiness and its just cause, he had lost his affection for his son. I hear that there was a terrible scene when Frank came home, a week after his wife had been buried. He claimed to have missed the telegram announcing her death to him at Nassau, but Munnybagge had already told some friends that he had got the dispatch in time for the steamer, but had remained over till the next one, because he had a flirtation on hand with little Gonzales, the Cuban heiress, and old Dobb had heard of it. Munnybagge never took him yachting again; and, speaking to me once about him, he designated him, not by name, but as "that infernal bloodless cad."
However, as I have said, there was a desperate row between father and son, and Frank is said to have slunk out of the house like a whipped cur, and been quite dull company at the supper which he took after the opera that night in Gillian Trussell's jolly Bohemian flat. When he emigrated, with his studio traps filling half a dozen packing cases, none of the boys bothered to see him off. They had learned to see through his good fellowship, and recalled a poor little phantom, to whose life and happiness he had been a wicked and bitter enemy.
About a year after his departure I read the announcement in the Herald of the marriage of Franklin D. Dobb, Sr., to a widow well-known and popular in society. I took the trouble to ascertain that it was Frank's father, and being among some of the boys that night, mentioned it to them.
"Well," remarked Smith, "that's really queer. You remember Frank left some things in my care when he went away? Yesterday I got a letter asking about them, and informing me that he had got married and was coming home."
He did come home, and he settled in his old studio. What sort of a meeting he had with his father this time I never heard. The old gentleman had been paying him his allowance regularly while he was away, and I believe he kept up the payment still. But otherwise he gave him no help, and if he ever needed help he did now.
His wife was a Cuban, as pretty and as helpless as a doll. She had been an heiress till her brother had turned rebel and had his property confiscated. Unfortunately for Frank, he had married her before the culmination of this catastrophe. In fact, he had been paying court to her with the dispatch announcing his wife's death in his pocket, and had married her long before the poor little clay was well settled in the grave he had sent it to. In marrying her he had evidently believed he was establishing his future. So he was, but it was a future of expiation for the sins and omissions of his past.