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Teresa's heart was lying. Go and demand sincerity from the heart, the narrator challenges us. To discerning minds, the previous dialogue had defined Tadeu de Albuquerque's daughter as a woman of a strength her century would have called manly. She possessed strength of character, pride fortified by love and freedom from commonplace fears, if fear is what one may call the surrender of one's own will before a father's improvident whims. There are good people who answer in the negative, and the narrator declares that he always follows the opinion of good people.
It would be no slander to attribute some cunning to Teresa, or hypocrisy if that word is preferred, although discernment would be the fairer name. She understood that loyalty stumbles at every step along life's royal road and that the best ends are sometimes reached by paths too narrow for frankness. Such devices were rare at her inexperienced age, but the woman of romance is hardly ever commonplace, and the fame Teresa would owe to misfortune was proof enough of distinction for the narrator.
From the letter in which Teresa had related the preceding scenes to Simão, criticism deduces that she was temporising with her father, awaiting the future without suffering the convent or breaking into open disobedience. In that account she omitted Baltasar's threats, which, if repeated, would have torn from Coimbra the young man whose pride and ferocity were more than sufficient to react to them. That, however, was not the letter that had surprised Simão Botelho in February.
For a time Teresa's sky appeared serene: her father spoke neither of cloister nor marriage, and Baltasar had returned to his estate in Castro Daire. The girl sent those good tidings every week, while Simão joined the fortunes of the heart to the riches of the mind, studying without rest and spending nights designing the edifice of future glory.
At daybreak on a Sunday in June 1803, Teresa was summoned to accompany her father to the first Mass at the parish church. She dressed in alarm and found Tadeu in the antechamber, receiving her pleasantly and asking whether she had risen in a good humour to grant the author of her days a happy old age. His daughter's silence questioned him.
‘Today you will give your hand in marriage to your cousin Baltasar, and you must let yourself be led blindly by your father's hand.’ ‘After that difficult step, you will understand that your happiness had to be imposed by violence.’ ‘Remember, my daughter, that a father's violence is always love, just as my indulgence and gentleness have been love.’ Tadeu compared himself favourably with fathers who would have subdued disobedience through ill-treatment, a harsh convent or a reduction of the inheritance. He praised his own prudence for waiting until time clarified his daughter's reason and dispelled the diabolical spell of the man who had awakened her innocent heart. He had not consulted her again, he explained, because reflection might impair the fervour of a good daughter with which she ought to embrace and thank him.
Teresa did not take her eyes from her father, but her abstraction was so profound that she barely heard his first words and none of the last. Taking her hands with charitable tenderness, Tadeu asked whether she would grant his request and fill with joy the few days remaining to him. ‘And will my father be happy with my sacrifice?’ Teresa faltered. Her father forbade the word ‘sacrifice’ and promised that by that hour on the following day a transformation would have taken place in her soul. He presented Baltasar as a compound of every virtue, handsome appearance included, as though wealth, learning and moral excellence were not already enough to manufacture the perfect husband.
‘And does he still want me after I refused him?’ Teresa asked with bitter irony. Tadeu assured her that his nephew was in love and sufficiently confident in himself to believe that Teresa would come to love him dearly. ‘Is it not more certain that I shall always hate him, if at this moment I abhor him as I never thought it possible to abhor anyone?’ With raised hands and tears running down her face, Teresa begged: ‘Father, kill me, but do not force me to marry my cousin.’ ‘Violence is useless, because I shall not marry.’
Tadeu's mask dissolved, and he shouted that his daughter would marry because such was his will. He cursed her for ever if she refused, threatened to make her die in a convent and to leave the house and fortune to her cousin. No scoundrel, he declared, would tread the carpets of his ancestors, and a base soul who dishonoured the family name would cease to be his daughter. He ordered her into her room to wait until she was torn from it and taken to another where she would not see a ray of sunlight. Without tears, Teresa rose and entered her room calmly.
Tadeu sought out Baltasar and announced that he could no longer give him his daughter, because the wretch to whom he had given that name was lost to the family and to herself. Baltasar, a compound of excellences in his uncle's judgement, had only one defect: an absolute want of honour. His ambush of love having failed, he had returned to Castro Daire saying that he would free Tadeu from the siege by which Simão held Teresa's heart. He advised against the convent, not from compassion but because of the scandalous conjectures public opinion would invent about the confinement. He advised that Teresa should remain at home and that they should wait for the chief magistrate's son to come.
His nephew's arguments weighed upon Tadeu's mind, and the father adopted such unexpected calm that Teresa marvelled at it and distrusted the inconsistency. She wrote to Simão and this time concealed nothing, including Baltasar's threats and her suspicion of some new and more carefully prepared scheme of violence. Teresa suspected violence because of her father's inexplicable calm; it was the narrator, not she, who disclosed Baltasar's plan.
By the time he reached the passage containing the threats, the student no longer had clear light in his eyes with which to decipher the rest of the letter. He shook as though fevered and the arteries in his forehead throbbed swollen, not from the alarm of a loving heart but from the pride that scalded his blood. Hatred's first counsel was to leave at once for Castro Daire and stab Baltasar inside his own house. He went out resolved, hired a horse and returned to dress for the journey, growing more enraged with every minute of delay.
The horse was half an hour late, and in that interval Simão's good angel appeared dressed in the finery with which, in his imagination, he clothed Teresa. He longed for the hours in which he had pursued the happiness promised by love through work and honour. He looked affectionately at his books as though every volume contained a page from the history of his heart, always illuminated by Teresa's image against weariness and impatience. With his face in his hands over the study table, he asked himself whether everything would end in that way, when only a short while before he had been so happy. He sprang to his feet, rebelling against happiness purchased at the dishonour of an unanswered threat.
But vengeance would make him a fugitive murderer, turn his father into his foremost enemy and perhaps inspire horror in Teresa herself. He reasoned further that the threat had been heard by her alone and that, had Baltasar truly diminished him in Teresa's eyes, the girl might not have repeated the insults to him. He reread the letter twice, and on the third reading the nobleman's bluster seemed less insulting. The final lines contradicted the suspicion tormenting his pride: they brought tender expressions, pleas for love in return for past and future sorrow, enchanting visions, sworn constancy and longing.
When the carrier knocked at the door, Simão was no longer thinking of killing the man from Castro Daire. He had decided, however, to go to Viseu, enter by night, conceal himself and see Teresa. He lacked a safe house, because at the inns he would be discovered immediately. He asked the carrier whether he knew anyone in Viseu capable of hiding him for a night or two without betraying him. The man replied that a quarter of a league from the city he had a cousin who was a farrier, although within Viseu he knew only innkeepers. Simão seized upon the relationship and at once gave him a fur jacket and a scarlet silk sash, promising a greater reward if he were well served in his amorous enterprise.
The following day the student reached the farrier's house, where the carrier explained the arrangement to his kinsman and Simão was cautiously lodged. The messenger immediately left for Viseu with a letter intended for a beggar woman who lived in the most inaccessible alley in the city. The old woman carefully examined the description of the person sending the paper, went out and returned shortly afterwards with the reply, which the carrier took back at a gallop.
The reply was a cry of joy, written without reflection at the news that Simão was so near. Teresa warned him that on that night the family was celebrating her father's birthday and that the relatives would be gathered in the house. She promised to go to the garden at exactly eleven o'clock and open the door for him.
The student had asked only for the hope of speaking from the street to her window and had feared that even this supreme pleasure would be impossible. The possibility of clasping her hand, feeling her breath, perhaps embracing her or daring a kiss exceeded his honest and modest ambitions, filling him at once with rapture and fear. They were imagined hopes, not gestures that had already occurred.
At the hour of departure Simão trembled and demanded an account of that timidity from himself. He did not know that the most angelic moments of the soul are precisely those fits of mysterious agitation, granted to the richest hearts at every age and to all men at least once.
At exactly eleven o'clock Simão was leaning against the garden door, while the carrier waited at the agreed distance holding the horse by the reins. The music coming from the distant rooms unsettled him, because for three long years he had never heard sounds of festivity in that house, ordinarily closed as though in mourning. He allowed chimaeras by turns black and translucent to fly around his impassioned imagination. The beautiful or terrible illusions invented by love acknowledge no rational boundary. With his ear pressed to the lock, Simão could distinguish only the sound of flutes and the beating of his own startled heart.