Mary Garth’s refusal to help Peter Featherstone alter his will turns a private bedside demand into a decisive test of conscience. Featherstone tries to make her an accomplice in destroying one of two wills; Mary refuses, even under pressure and an offer of money. The choice protects her from suspicion, but it also gives her an unanticipated influence over the production of the later will and the fortunes of the people waiting to learn what he has left behind.

The Demand at the Bedside

At three o’clock in the morning, Featherstone insists that he has all his faculties and knows where his property and money are. He says that he has prepared everything to change his mind at the last, and explains that he has made two wills and intends to burn one. His confidence in his own competence is part of his case: he presents the destruction not as confusion but as an intentional exercise of his right to decide what happens to his property.

He gives Mary the key to his iron chest and instructs her how to open it, remove the topmost paper, and identify the printed last will and testament. The request is concrete and immediate: Mary is not merely to approve his intention but to handle the chest and paper herself. She answers firmly that she cannot do it. When he insists that she must, she explains that touching the chest or will could leave her open to suspicion.

Pressure, Refusal, and the Offer of Money

Featherstone’s resistance to her refusal first appears as urgency. He tells Mary there is no time to lose and repeats that he is in his right mind and should be allowed to do as he likes. Mary does not accept his appeal to his intentions as sufficient protection for herself. She moves away from the bedside, making her refusal physical as well as verbal: she will not take part in the act he is pressing her to perform.

Featherstone then tries another means of persuasion. He begins emptying the tin box before him with his bony left hand and offers Mary the notes and gold, promising that she may have it all if she does as he asks. The offer sharpens the moral stakes: what Mary stands to gain is explicit, while the risk of suspicion is precisely what she has already named. She tells him to put the money away and returns to her seat by the fire rather than accept the bribe or continue negotiating over the will.

Fred Vincy and the Uncertain Choice

After Mary refuses the money, Featherstone asks her to call Fred Vincy. Mary’s heart beats faster as she considers what burning a second will might imply. The decision has become more complicated than declining to touch the chest: she must decide whether to summon Fred while the old man is intent on acting without witnesses.

Mary offers to call him only if Featherstone will also allow her to call Mr. Jonah and others. He rejects this condition and insists that he wants the young man alone. The exchange leaves Mary caught between obeying a dying man’s demand and ensuring that his intended act will not happen unseen. The episode establishes the constraint under which she later understands her own part: she has had to choose quickly, without knowing what the destruction of one will would mean for the competing intentions embodied in the papers.

The Later Wills and Mary’s Influence

When Featherstone’s wills are later brought into the open, the lawyer Mr. Standish identifies a will he had drawn up and Featherstone had executed on 9 August 1825. He also discovers a subsequent instrument, previously unknown to him, dated 20 July 1826, and a codicil to that later will dated 1 March 1828. The dates turn the bedside crisis into a matter of competing documents and successive decisions rather than a simple act of last-minute revision.

Mary alone knows what passed on Featherstone’s final night. As the later will is produced, she feels the excitement of knowing that she has virtually determined whether it would come to light, and that its appearance may have momentous effects on the lot of people present. Her refusal does not settle the wills’ meaning or decide who will inherit; instead, it prevents her from secretly carrying out the destruction Featherstone requested and leaves the documents’ consequences to be confronted openly.

Significance of the Refusal

The scene shifts Mary from a position of apparent powerlessness beside a dying employer to a position of concealed moral responsibility. Featherstone has the key, the papers, and the authority of ownership, but he cannot make Mary lend her hands to his plan. Her insistence that she will not let the close of his life soil the beginning of hers defines the boundary she will not cross, even when he pressures her with urgency and money.

The episode also makes the will’s physical custody consequential. An iron chest, a key, a printed paper, and a tin box of notes and gold are not incidental props: each gives Featherstone a different means of control, while Mary’s refusal interrupts the action he intends. The later revelation of the 1826 will and its 1828 codicil confirms the importance of the decision without making Mary an author of their contents. Her role is narrower and more exacting: by refusing to destroy a will for him, she helps determine which evidence of his changing intentions can enter the inheritance dispute.