As we can suspect him of no better principle, his motive most probably may have been vanity and the love of his art.
He would nevertheless have declined giving his attendance in the present case had he known whither the kind gossips were conducting him, in time sufficient to frame an apology.

But, ere he guessed where he was going, the leech was hurried into the house of the late Oliver Proudfute, from which he heard the chant of the women as they swathed and dressed the corpse of the umquhile bonnet maker for the ceremony of next morning, of which chant the following verses may be received as a modern imitation: Viewless essence, thin and bare, Well nigh melted into air, Still with fondness hovering near The earthly form thou once didst wear, Pause upon thy pinion's flight; Be thy course to left or right, Be thou doom'd to soar or sink, Pause upon the awful brink.
To avenge the deed expelling Thee untimely from thy dwelling, Mystic force thou shalt retain O'er the blood and o'er the brain.
When the form thou shalt espy That darken'd on thy closing eye, When the footstep thou shalt hear That thrill'd upon thy dying ear, Then strange sympathies shall wake, The flesh shall thrill, the nerves shall quake, The wounds renew their clotter'd flood, And every drop cry blood for blood! Hardened as he was, the physician felt reluctance to pass the threshold of the man to whose death he had been so directly, though, so far as the individual was concerned, mistakingly, accessory.
"Let me pass on, women," he said, "my art can only help the living--the dead are past our power." "Nay, but your patient is upstairs--the youngest orphan"-- Dwining was compelled to go into the house.

But he was surprised when, the instant he stepped over the threshold, the gossips, who were busied with the dead body, stinted suddenly in their song, while one said to the others: "In God's name, who entered?
That was a large gout of blood." "Not so," said another voice, "it is a drop of the liquid balm." "Nay, cummer, it was blood.

Again I say, who entered the house even now ?" One looked out from the apartment into the little entrance, where Dwining, under pretence of not distinctly seeing the trap ladder by which he was to ascend into the upper part of this house of lamentation, was delaying his progress purposely, disconcerted with what had reached him of the conversation.
"Nay, it is only worthy Master Henbane Dwining," answered one of the sibyls.
"Only Master Dwining," replied the one who had first spoken, in a tone of acquiescence--"our best helper in need! Then it must have been balm sure enough." "Nay," said the other, "it may have been blood nevertheless; for the leech, look you, when the body was found, was commanded by the magistrates to probe the wound with his instruments, and how could the poor dead corpse know that that was done with good purpose ?" "Ay, truly, cummer; and as poor Oliver often mistook friends for enemies while he was in life, his judgment cannot be thought to have mended now." Dwining heard no more, being now forced upstairs into a species of garret, where Magdalen sat on her widowed bed, clasping to her bosom her infant, which, already black in the face and uttering the gasping, crowing sound which gives the popular name to the complaint, seemed on the point of rendering up its brief existence.

A Dominican monk sat near the bed, holding the other child in his arms, and seeming from time to time to speak a word or two of spiritual consolation, or intermingle some observation on the child's disorder.
The mediciner cast upon the good father a single glance, filled With that ineffable disdain which men of science entertain against interlopers.