historian was not useful for Rickman's purposes. He was preoccupied
with the Hardens, their antiquity and splendour; he grovelled before
them; every event in their history gave him an opportunity of
observing that their motto was _Invictus_. He certainly seemed to have
found them so; for when he wrote of them his style took on the curious
contortions and prostrations of his spirit. The poor wretch, in the
pay of the local bookseller, had saturated himself with heraldry till
he saw gules.

To a vision thus inflamed book-collecting was simply a quaint
hereditary freak, and scholarship a distinction wholly superfluous in
a race that owned half the parish, and had its arms blazoned on the
east windows of a church and the sign-board of a public-house. And
with the last generation the hereditary passion had apparently
exhausted itself. "The present owner, Sir Frederick Harden," said the
chronicler, "has made no addition to the library of his ancestors."
What he had done was not recorded in the history of the Hardens. It
was silent also as to the ladies of that house, beyond drawing
attention to the curious fact that no woman had ever been permitted to
inherit the Harden Library. The inspired pen of the chronicler evoked
the long procession of those Hardens whose motto was _Invictus_;
crossed-legged crusading Hardens, Hardens in trunk hose, Hardens in
ruff and doublet, in ruffles and periwig; Hardens in powder and
patches, in the loosest of stocks and the tightest of trousers; and
never a petticoat among them all. It was just as well, Rickman
reflected, that Poppy's frivolous little phantom had not danced after
him into the Harden library; those other phantoms might not have
received it very kindly, unless indeed Sir Thomas, the maker of
madrigals, had spared it a shadowy smile.