"I should feel uncomfortable," replied Sara. "I should feel that I was enriched at the expense of the Stephensons; I am sure that I should feel almost as though I had committed a fraud. Papa," she added more eagerly, the idea occurring to her, "I should like to give the money back to them."
"That is the very argument I have been using myself. Wedderburn, Lady Oswald's lawyer, has been here, talking of the matter, and I told him that were I the man to whom it was left, I should give it back, every shilling of it, to the channel where it ought at once to have gone--the brothers Stephenson. Wedderburn did not agree with me: he brought forward the argument that the man's children might reproach him afterwards. What do you think?"
"I think, papa, that were I the man you speak of, I should act upon my own judgment, and give it back without reference to the opinion of my children."
"That is precisely what he has resolved to do. Sara, the money is left to me."
Sara Davenal, taken completely by surprise, halted in her walk and looked at the Doctor, not knowing how to believe him.
"It is true, Sara. I find I am the favoured legatee of Lady Oswald: knowing at the same time that I have no more right to be so than have those espalier rose-trees at your side. I have resolved to refuse the money; to repudiate the will altogether, so far as my share in it goes; and to suffer a previous will to be acted upon, which gives the money to the Stephensons. I trust my children will not hereafter turn round and reproach me."
She spoke the words now almost reproachfully, in reproach that he could ever think it.
"Yes, I shall do it, Sara. And yet," he added, his voice insensibly sinking to a whisper, "I have heavy need for money just now, and the help these thousands would be to me no one but myself knows."
Sara was silent. A shiver passed over her face at the allusion. She did not dare reply to it. The subject was too painful; and, besides, she was kept partially in the dark.
"But I cannot tamper with my conscience," resumed Dr. Davenal. "Were I to take this money, it would only lie like a weight upon it for my whole future life. I believe--and, Sara, I wish you to believe it and treasure it as an assured truth--that money appropriated by ourselves, which in point of right, of justice, belongs to others, _never_ comes home to us with a blessing. However safely the law may give it us and the world deem our claim to it legitimate, if we deprive others of it, whose it is by every moral and--may I say it?--divine right, that money will not bless us or our children. Sara, I speak this from the experience of an observant life."