The home-coming of father, who has done a "length" or a "stretch," is sometimes quite a local event. I went into a little Hoxton house the other day and found great preparations in progress. The eldest girl was scrubbing the floor, the younger children were helping to tidy up. Mother had been out marketing, and on the fire was a saucepan giving forth a savoury smell. The little family seemed so excitedly happy that I ventured to ask the cause of the jubilant bustling.
"Father's coming out of prison to-day," said a little girl, smiling sweetly.
I did not like to ask to be permitted to stay and witness the home-coming of the gentleman, who had frequently returned to the bosom of his family under similar circumstances, but I knew exactly what would happen. The little domestic reunion would be delightful, and all would go well till evening. Then the welcome would be of a more public character, and the hero of the occasion would have considerably more drink offered him than was wise after a long period of enforced abstinence.
Here the home-coming is shorn of its pathos, for it takes place among a class who are openly at war with Society. The criminal's welcome to his home is that of a released prisoner of war--one who fell into the hands of the enemy and is now set free.
The painful home-coming is that of the amateur criminal--the man or woman who has taken a fatal step and endured the _shame_ of imprisonment. Then the return of the father or the son to the home to which he has been a stranger so long is often a poignant little domestic drama. I have seen a decent man come out of prison--a man who was innocent, and whom I knew to be innocent--and even in his case the first meeting with friends and acquaintances was a painful trial.
In the respectable family the joy of a relative's return is damped by the knowledge that the prison taint clings, that nothing ever wholly removes it. The man from gaol--the woman from gaol--may be loyally determined never again to deviate by a hair's-breadth from the straight path, but the world does not take the future into consideration when it reckons up the moral worth of a man or woman. The previous conviction is not mentioned in a Court of Justice till the accused has been found guilty. In the world the previous conviction stands against a man throughout his life, though he may never sin again.