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Chapter XIII turns back from the post-sentence prison to Teresa's departure immediately after Baltasar's death. ‘And Teresa?’ the narrator asks, acknowledging his female readers' impatience. He accepts that they may accuse him of sacrificing her to lesser incidents, but denies having forgotten her. In his near-darkness, that heavenly bird still appears to him, winged like the saints' ideal cherub. Teresa left on earth a trail of more tears than blood, and the narrator wishes to cover it with flowers. He addresses her as a daughter of sorrow and asks whether those tears are not worth more before God than a reputation for holiness recognised by human hypocrisy.
Teresa had been carried from the church steps, where she had fallen, into the litter heading towards Porto. When she recovered her breath, she saw before her a maid offering conventional, cold words of comfort. Tadeu had chosen Constança precisely because she was not his daughter's friend. Teresa no longer even had the confidence to express her grief in cries. She wondered whether it was all a dream, lost strength and came back to herself whenever awareness of her misery shook her. Constança was finally moved to pity, wept with her and assured her that she could speak because no one was following them. Baltasar's sisters, Teresa's cousins, had remained in Viseu; only two footmen accompanied the litter. Tadeu was not coming either, so the maid said that Teresa could weep and speak freely. Teresa confirmed that they were taking her to Porto and addressed the maid by name. She then asked Constança to give her a faithful account of everything she had seen. Constança confirmed that Baltasar had died almost at Teresa's feet. Then, obeying Tadeu, the servants tried to seize Simão, who still had another pistol. With sudden joy, Teresa interrupted her to ask whether Simão had escaped. Her hope collapsed when Constança explained that Simão had surrendered voluntarily and was in prison.
After her sobs had eased a little, Teresa proposed escaping from the first inn at which they stopped. She wanted to return to Viseu to bid Simão a final farewell. It was Constança, not the abbess, who dissuaded her by showing that escape would add new dangers to Simão's plight. She also reminded her that paternal influence might save him despite Tadeu's persecution; Teresa yielded to reason, not to confinement. Weeping, ill and intermittently fainting, Teresa completed the journey to Monchique in five days.
Faster messengers had carried news of the events to the convent ahead of the slow-moving litter. The abbess, Teresa's aunt, received her kindly, although Tadeu demanded strict confinement and an absolute ban on writing. She heard her niece's faithful account and examined Simão's letters with her, one by one. Aunt and niece wept in one another's arms. Then the abbess dried her womanly tears in the fire of austerity and counselled Teresa as a nun. For forty years she had disciplined body and heart through penance and deprivation. Teresa no longer had the strength to rebel and left her aunt the holy vanity of exorcising the demon of passion. Between love and hope, the angel of death seemed to smile at her with the black wing that sometimes shines in unhappy hearts. When Teresa wished to write, the abbess asked whom the letter was for; Teresa did not answer. The nun warned her that the letters might not even reach Simão and would merely redouble Tadeu's anger against them both. If she loved him, she should try to save him: feign forgetfulness, master her grief and allow signs of obedience to reach her father. That feigned obedience would depend on Tadeu showing pity for the unfortunate prisoner. Teresa did not resist the advice, but her submission arose from strategy and weakness, not consent to confinement. She smiled again at the angel of death, asking it to wrap her love and her hope in the same darkness.
Every month Tadeu wrote to his cousin, the abbess of Monchique. The letters served as a vent for his vengeance and repeated that the murderer would inevitably go to the gallows. Teresa did not read them, but she saw the compassionate nun's tears. Her frail constitution was deteriorating rapidly, and the doctors predicted an early death. When told the prognosis, Tadeu replied that he did not wish his daughter dead. Yet if God took her, he would die calmer and with his honour unstained. ‘Such was the immaculate honour of the gentleman of Viseu,’ the narrator comments ironically. He contrasts it with the virtue of Socrates, Jesus Christ and the martyrs who preached charity and forgiveness to humanity. The nuns of Monchique used every kindness devised by sympathy and pity to relieve the burning illness consuming Teresa. It was all useless: she thanked them with tears, but saw in their care confirmation that the doctors considered her incurable.
One day, a nun inadvertently told her that a friend at the Remédios convent in Lamego had said that Simão had been sentenced to death. Teresa shuddered and, no longer strong enough to exclaim, murmured: ‘And I am still alive!’ She prayed and wept, while her habitual succession of emotional crises remained unchanged. She asked whether the friend at Remédios could arrange for a letter to reach Simão's hands. The nun agreed after obtaining the abbess's approval. The abbess judged that the final colloquy of two dying people could harm them neither in temporal life nor in eternity. Teresa wrote first, and Simão read the letter fifteen days after his trial.
‘Simão, my husband,’ Teresa began, expressing a pledged union of souls, not a marriage already recognised by law. She knew everything, felt death beside them both and wrote without tears. Her agony, she said, had begun seven months earlier, and God had been good in sparing her from the crime. On hearing that Simão would soon die, she had understood why she herself was dying hour by hour. There lay the end of them both and of the hopes they had shared in their dreams of happiness. She asked what harm such innocent desires could do God and why they did not deserve what so many others possessed. She could not believe that their destiny would end in this way. Eternity appeared dark because hope had been the light that led her from Simão towards faith. She asked him to attach the last thread of his life to whatever hope he could find. Would they see one another again in another world, and had she deserved before God to behold him there? She prayed and pleaded, but her faith faltered when she imagined the final agonies of Simão's martyrdom. Her own pains were gentle and almost imperceptible, for death should cost little to a tranquil heart. The worst pain was longing for the hopes each had discerned in the other's heart. If nothing existed beyond this life, at least death would mean forgetting. Even if Simão could live, she asked, what use would life be to him if Teresa too was condemned and beyond remedy? ‘Follow me, Simão! Do not long for life,’ she wrote to a man she believed inevitably condemned, without thereby asking him to kill himself. She asked him not to repent, even if reason said that he might have been happy had he not met her on the path that led him to death. Faced with that terrible death, she begged him to accept it and feel no regret. If there had been a crime, God's justice would forgive him for the anguish endured in prison and during his final days. The letter ended the sentence with ‘and in the presence of...’, without completing the word. The pen fell from her hand and a convulsion ran through her body for a long time. She did not write the word: the thought of the gallows had brought her life to a halt. A nun entered to collect the letter before the post departed. Unable to do it herself, Teresa pointed to the paper and asked the nun to read and seal it as an act of charity.
For the next three days, Teresa did not leave her bed, and every hour the nuns expected her to close her eyes for the last time. ‘It is very hard to die,’ the sick woman would sometimes say. There was no shortage of pious discourses seeking to turn her thoughts away from the world. Teresa listened and asked anxiously: ‘But hope of heaven without him... what is heaven, my God?’ The convent chaplain could not say whether heavenly blessings shared the delights that are falsely given that name on earth. The narrator compares Teresa's spiritual acuity to the last flickers of life observed in some forms of wasting disease. The analogy does not, however, allow Teresa's illness to be named with certainty. When the chaplain, drawn by her lucidity, discussed the immortality of the soul, Teresa replied in few words. Despite her lack of education, she argued clearly for the eternal union of souls already pledged to one another as spouses in this world. The priest even wondered whether it would be heretical to dispute a clause absent from all four Gospels. Meanwhile, the doctors marvelled at the persistence of that fragile life.
The abbess wrote to Tadeu, urging him to come quickly and see that angel take leave of the earth. Moved by pity and perhaps by paternal love, a motive the narrator leaves uncertain, Tadeu decided to remove his daughter from the convent and try to save her. There was another powerful reason: Simão was to be transferred to the prisons of Porto. Tadeu hurried and reached Porto as a nun there, a friend of the nun in Lamego, delivered Simão's reply to Teresa. ‘Do not leave me yet, Teresa,’ Simão began. He no longer saw the gallows or death: his father was protecting him, and deliverance was possible. He asked her to bind the last threads of life to her heart and prolong her agony for as long as he could say that he hoped. The following day he would go to the prisons of Porto, where he would await acquittal or commutation of his sentence. These were possibilities, not guarantees; the letter merely made room for hope again. ‘Life is everything,’ he wrote: he could love her in exile, for everywhere there were sky, flowers and God. If Teresa lived, she would one day be free; the stone of the tomb, however, can never be lifted. ‘Live, Teresa, live!’ Days earlier, he had imagined that her tears would wash from his face the stains of the hanged man's blood. That nightmare had passed: one could breathe in hell again, and the executioner's rope no longer tightened around his throat in dreams. He was once again raising his eyes to the sky and recognising the providence of the unfortunate. The previous night he had seen the stars of the secrets they shared during nights apart; he had returned to life and his heart was full of hope. The letter ended: ‘Do not die, daughter of my soul!’
It was late at night when Teresa read the letter, sitting up in bed. She called Constança to help her dress, ordered the window opened and pressed her face against the iron bars. The window overlooked the sea, an immense silver flame that night, while the moon outshone the stars Teresa was seeking. ‘There they are! My stars, pale as I am,’ she exclaimed. She rose, passed her cadaverous hands over her brow and cried: ‘Life! I want to live! Let me live, O Lord!’ Constança assured her that she would live, but begged her to avoid the night air and the river mist. Teresa replied that breathing that air was life: she had not seen the sky for so long and felt herself rising again beside the window. She asked whether she might live for a few years and begged Constança to pray fervently to the Blessed Virgin. Simão would not die, she said; he would reach Porto the following day and might already be there. Constança thought her mistress was delirious, but did not contradict her and asked whether she had received a letter from him. She imagined that she was merely sustaining that moment of feverish joy. Teresa read the letter to her, and Constança's great astonishment gave way to belief. Teresa then invited the maid to pray and asked whether she was Simão's enemy. She imagined marrying him and taking Constança into their shared household, where the maid would be happy. Constança agreed, but asked whether Simão would manage to escape death. Teresa replied that his father would save him and the Blessed Virgin would unite them; immediately afterwards, however, she thought of the possibility that she might die. With her hands convulsively clasped over her breast, she gasped and wept: she had no strength left, everyone said she would die and the doctor had stopped prescribing medicine. It would have been better to die before that hour, she lamented, than to die now with hope. Invoking the Mother of God, she knelt before the devotional altarpiece she had brought from her room in Viseu. Teresa's mother and grandmother had already prayed before that compassionate image and fixed upon it the last light of their dying eyes.