She is the most dramatic of American women writers. Do you remember the ending of the first chapter of To Have and To Hold? A shipload of maidens, “fair and chaste, but meanly born,” has arrived at Jamestown, Virginia, in the early days of that settlement. A friend traveling by has told Ralph Percy about it and counseled him to go to town and get him a wife. Percy rejects the idea, but his friend passing on he finds himself alone and lonely in a cheerless house. He tries to read Master Shakespeare’s plays and cannot. Idly he begins dicing. His mind goes back to the English manorhouse that had been his home.
“To-morrow would be my thirty-sixth birthday. All the numbers that I cast were high. ‘If I throw ambs-ace,’ I said, with a smile for my own caprice, ‘curse me if I do not take Rolfe’s advice!’
“I shook the box and clapped it down upon the table, then lifted it, and stared with a lengthening face at what it had hidden; which done, I diced no more, but put out my lights and went soberly to bed.”
Still more dramatic because it makes a greater demand upon the reader’s imagination, requiring him to picture for himself the ceaseless self-torture of a murderer, is the ending of Lewis Rand. Rand has killed Ludwell Cary and has not been found out. At length he walks into the sheriff’s office. When the news gets abroad “the boy who minded the sheriff’s door found himself a hero, and the words treasured that fell from his tongue.” The last words of the book are as follows:
“‘Fairfax Cary [brother of the slain man] was in the court room yesterday when he [Rand] was committed. He [Fairfax Cary] and Lewis Rand spoke to each other, but no one heard what they said.’
“The boy came to the front again. ‘I didn’t hear much that morning before Mr. Garrett [the sheriff] sent me away, but I heard why he [Rand] gave himself up. I thought it wasn’t much of a reason——’
“The crowd pressed closer, ‘What was it, Michael, what was it?’
“‘It sounds foolish,’ answered the boy, ‘but I’ve got it right. He said he must have sleep.’”
The funeral of Stonewall Jackson in the last pages of The Long Roll:
“Beneath arching trees, by houses of mellow red brick, houses of pale gray stucco, by old porches and ironwork balconies, by wistaria and climbing roses and magnolias with white chalices, the long procession bore Stonewall Jackson. By St. Paul’s they bore him, by Washington and the great bronze men in his company, by Jefferson and Marshall, by Henry and Mason, by Lewis and Nelson. They bore him over the greensward to the Capitol steps, and there the hearse stopped. Six generals lifted the coffin, Longstreet going before. The bells tolled and the Dead March rang, and all the people on the green slopes of the historic place uncovered their heads and wept. The coffin, high-borne, passed upward and between the great, white, Doric columns. It passed into the Capitol and into the Hall of the Lower House. Here it rested before the Speaker’s Chair.