Sir Richard Weston, Baron of Exchequer and Lord High Treasurer to his Majesty King Charles I., was disrobing for the night in his official residence off Chancellor’s or Chancery Lane. He was a man of inflexible routine, who changed his raiment, parcelled out his duties, and pigeon-holed his correspondence with an unswerving regularity from which nothing could ever make him deviate but a bribe. He had a suit of clothes for Monday, a suit for Wednesday, another for Friday, and so on—a change on every third day; and in the doublet of each suit was a little pocket below the waist, into which it was his custom to slip all memoranda of affairs requiring his early attention. This pocket it was the valet’s duty to explore upon every occasion of exchange into fresh habiliments.
Now, system has this drawback, that it entices those who practise it into a confidence in their inability to err, which is in itself an error. Pigeon-holes are useful things, if one is convinced that every article in them is docketed under its obvious letter. But, alas! in actual fact the short cut too often proves itself the longest way round, and the pigeon has an amazing way of hiding in the unexpected compartment. He may fail to answer to his own name or his firm’s, and leave one in the last resort only his subject or his business by which to trace him—if, indeed, one can identify either under a capital letter. We have known an orderly man to tear the heart out of a nest of pigeon-holes from “B” to “Z,” only at length to find what he sought under “Anonymous.” Yet he remained no less convinced than the Treasurer that he had eliminated confusion from his category of affairs. System, in short, may provide against everything but the bad memory which most trusts to it.
Sir Richard, pleasantly conscious of his calves and upwards, reared himself on his toes and yawned and sank down again.
“Is aught there, varlet?” he demanded. “Bring me whatsoever it containeth.”
The man laid down the discarded doublet.
“Naught, my lord,” he said, “but a single scrap of paper.”
“Give it me.”
The servant crossed the room, and presented the memorandum with an obeisance. The master accepted it, glanced down, and stood suddenly rigid.
“Remember Cæsar!”
That was all—just those two words, written bold in ink in an unknown hand. “Remember Cæsar!”