A curious circumstance has stamped the day of that reprieve on my memory.
On the morning that the Home Secretary's decision was announced I was at Madame Tussaud's Exhibition. The effigy of the condemned woman had, in deference to public opinion, which was divided, been put in a separate room, instead of in the Chamber of Horrors—the usual department for condemned criminals.
On the day of the reprieve a number of people were standing in front of the figure, which was naturally a special attraction. "Ah!" said a man standing near me, "they'll have to take her out of this place altogether some day."
Fifteen years later this woman was released on license, or, as those who cling to old forms of expression say, "ticket-of-leave." That very day her effigy was removed from the premises, and it no longer forms part of the exhibition.
This convict came out into the world. The fact was duly recorded in the Press with considerable emotional comment, and the old dispute as to her guilt or innocence was temporarily revived.
But to how many people did the most dramatic feature of the tragedy present itself? Few of those who re-discussed the celebrated case in all its points remembered that the children of the "murderess" had lived their lives and grown up in ignorance of their mother's fate.
When the unhappy woman was free once more, did she seek her children and reveal herself, or did she mercifully leave their lives unshadowed by the knowledge that the celebrated convict about whose release all the world was talking was their mother?
That is a matter with which the public has no concern, and one into which the Press has very rightly made no attempt to pry. But if the truth were not revealed, if the unhappy mother denied herself the supreme reward of the long years of patient endurance in the silent world, it may have happened that the young people one day as they walked abroad saw a lady looking at them with strange, pathetic intentness, and passed on their way little dreaming that the sad-looking lady was their mother, who had been condemned to death as a murderess long years ago, and had yet lived to see her children grown-up and happy.
No dramatist has given us a situation more intensely human and pathetic than that.
Without the sensational surroundings, strange meetings and reunions are constantly taking place in this great soul-absorbing London of ours. It is a feature of the human drama that is most completely ignored, one that is rarely dwelt upon even by the writers who probe deep down into the mysteries of life in the great City. But the fathers and mothers come home from the prisons and the convict gaols to those who love them.