Nathan the Tempter.
One evening just after sunset Nathan arrived, driving a team of six smart mules before a brand-new cart. He had bought the turn-out at Clanwilliam on his return journey from Cape Town. He was accompanied by Koos Bester, at whose camp he had called in passing.
Nathan had entered into a contract to supply a firm of butchers in Cape Town with slaughter oxen; Bester, who owned a lot of cattle which were running, half-wild, in Bushmanland, agreed to sell him a certain number upon terms very advantageous to the purchaser.
Nathan was as unlike Max as it is possible for one brother to be unlike another. He was a low-sized, knock-kneed man of a fair complexion which burnt to a fiery red on the least exposure. His features were of the lowest Hebrew type—his lips were full and shapeless, his nose large and prominent, his eyes small and colourless, but exceedingly bright and glittering.
Since Max had awakened from boyhood to manhood he had come to hate this brother of his, to whom money was the only god worth worshipping, and who sneered at every impulse or aspiration that did not have gain for its object.
Next morning poor Max had a bad time of it. The books were examined, and when the debit entry against the Hattinghs came to light and Max was unable to give any satisfactory explanation as to why he had disregarded his instructions in allowing this account to be increased, Nathan treated him to the grossest abuse. However, things were found to be in a satisfactory condition on the whole; in fact Nathan could find nothing but this one item to find fault with. All day long he kept recurring to this one blot upon a good record, until at length Max became extremely angry and said that if Nathan would only stop talking about it he would pay the value of the articles sold out of his own salary. At this Nathan looked at him with a searching glint in his eye, but said nothing further on the subject.
In the afternoon Nathan went for a stroll among the camps, in the course of which he learned two things, namely, Max’s relations with Susannah, and the fact that old Gert Gemsbok, the Hottentot, who had been placed under the ban for giving evidence against a Boer, was in his service. Nathan returned to the shop, filled with sardonic fury. Max at once saw that the hour he had been dreading for months had come.
“Well,” said Nathan, after he had regarded his brother for a few seconds with an evil smile, “going to get married, eh?”
“Yes—what of that?” Max felt his courage rising; he no longer dreaded the thing before him.
“You, a Jew, and the child of Jews, to talk of marrying a Christian slut who was born under a bush and reared by stinking Boers in a mat-house?”