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Tadeu de Albuquerque might not have objected to the impurity of the chief magistrate's blood if the marriage of their children could have been reconciled with one father's hatred and the other's contempt. Domingos Botelho mocked his neighbour's rancour, while Tadeu avenged his own humiliation by accusing the magistrate of venality. The chief magistrate knew of that insulting retaliation and pretended the slander did not touch him, but his bile grew more bitter from day to day. It may be believed that, but for family considerations, he would have relieved his anger through the mouth of a blunderbuss, a weapon particularly esteemed by the Botelhos Correias de Mesquita. Reconciling those two men would have been a superhuman task.
One day Rita, the chief magistrate's youngest daughter, was at the window of Simão's room and saw Teresa by the panes of the house opposite, her brow resting on her hands. Teresa knew that the child was Simão's favourite sister and the one who most resembled him in appearance. For an instant she abandoned her carefully performed indifference, answered Rita's gaze with a wave of her hand and smiled at her. Rita smiled too, but fled at once, because her mother had forbidden her daughters even to exchange glances with anyone in that house.
At the same hour the next day, drawn by the warmth of that smile, the child returned to the window and found Teresa with her eyes fixed on Rita's window, as though she had been waiting. They smiled cautiously and stepped back from their sills at the same moment, standing inside their rooms and looking at one another across the narrow street. As the distance allowed them to speak softly, Teresa asked, more by the movement of her lips than by sound, whether Rita wished to be her friend. The child nodded her assent and withdrew, leaving a gesture of farewell in the air.
Those brief encounters were repeated for several days, until fear diminished and both dared to linger in whispered conversations. Teresa spoke of Simão, entrusted the secret of her love to the eleven-year-old child and told her that one day they would be sisters. She warned her, however, to reveal nothing to the family.
During one of those conversations, Rita forgot herself and raised her voice so much that another sister heard and went to report her to their father. Domingos summoned his youngest daughter and, by terrifying her, forced her to repeat everything she had heard from the neighbour. His fury was such that, ignoring the arguments of his wife, who had been frightened by his shouting, he rushed to Simão's room and still saw Teresa at the window.
‘Do not dare set your eyes upon anyone in my house,’ the chief magistrate shouted at the pale girl. ‘If you wish to marry, marry a shoemaker, who would be a worthy son-in-law for your father.’ Teresa did not hear the end of the brutal address, for she had fled bewildered and ashamed. Domingos continued roaring in the room, and when Tadeu appeared at a window, the long-dammed torrent of abuse struck his neighbour full in the face. Tadeu did not dare answer him.
He later questioned his daughter and accepted that the magistrate's fury had arisen merely from two girls innocently communicating by gestures about matters suited to their age. He excused Teresa's childishness and merely warned her not to return to that window. The gentleness of that naturally fierce man was explained by a plan already prepared: soon to marry his daughter to her cousin Baltasar Coutinho, master of an estate in Castro Daire and a nobleman of the same lineage. A presumptuous expert on the female heart, Tadeu considered gentleness the surest means of leading Teresa to forget the love he called childish.
His maxim was that a passion at fifteen lacked sufficient substance to survive six months of absence. The nobleman did not reason badly; nevertheless, the error existed. Exceptions have mocked the wisest thinkers, in speculation as well as in positive science, and it is no wonder that Tadeu should have been mistaken in matters of love. The variations of the female heart are so numerous, the narrator adds, that perhaps only this rule can guide us: within each woman four incomprehensible women take turns contradicting one another. The rule, though very safe, was not infallible, for Teresa appeared to be one within herself.
Such constancy might owe less to the heart than to a secluded life without society, courtship or the dizziness of comparing an absent image with suitors present in flesh and voice. Who could say that Teresa would preserve that unity if four censers of flattery made her head swim? It is neither easy nor necessary to decide, he concludes, before returning to the story.
Tadeu never uttered Simão's name before his daughter, either before or after the magistrate's senseless outburst. Instead, he summoned his nephew Baltasar from Castro Daire and explained the plan so that he might present himself to Teresa as the chosen suitor. It fell to him to act in such a way that the two cousins would fall in love with each other and promise an auspicious future for the marriage.
On Baltasar's side, passion caught fire as rapidly as Teresa's heart froze with terror and revulsion. The heir attributed his cousin's coldness to modesty, innocence and shyness, savouring in advance the pleasure of a slow but certain conquest. He had not yet declared himself in a manner demanding a decisive answer when, urged on by his uncle, he resolved to open his heart to the melancholy girl.
‘It is time to open my heart to you, cousin; are you disposed to hear me?’ ‘I am always disposed to hear you, cousin Baltasar,’ Teresa replied with such weary indifference that she shook some of his convictions about her innocence and shyness. Baltasar preferred to persuade himself that goodwill could take no other form and declared their hearts united, with only their houses left to unite. Teresa turned pale and lowered her eyes, not in virginal assent but before something impossible for her to accept.
‘You are mistaken, cousin: our hearts are not united, and although I esteem you greatly, I have never thought of becoming your wife.’ Humiliated, the heir asked whether Teresa detested him. ‘No, sir, but I must not become the wife of a friend whom I cannot love, because the unhappiness would not be mine alone.’ With a dissembling smile, Baltasar asked who contested his cousin's heart and what he might gain from that disclosure. Teresa confirmed only that she loved another man.
‘And do you love him with such passion that you disobey your father?’ ‘I do not disobey, because the heart is stronger than a daughter's submissive will.’ ‘I would disobey if I married against my father's will; I have only told you that I love.’ Baltasar feigned astonishment at finding so many words in his sixteen-year-old cousin, as though her clarity were an unexpected affront. ‘They are not merely words, cousin, but true feelings worthy of your esteem; would I stand higher in your eyes if I lied to you?’
Baltasar approved her truthfulness only to demand the rest and asked the name of the fortunate mortal, pleading the vanity of knowing by what merits he had been defeated. He asked her to entrust the secret to her cousin as she would to her closest friend. Smiling and measuring her syllables as he did, Teresa replied that she could no longer regard him in that light. ‘You do not forgive my sincerity, cousin, and from this day forward you will be my enemy.’
With poorly concealed irony, Baltasar promised to prove his friendship if he ever saw her married to a wretch unworthy of her. Before Teresa could answer the word ‘married’, he described his rival as a notorious drunkard, a stick-fighter, a bully of water carriers and a distinguished gentleman who spent his academic years in Coimbra's prisons. It was clear that Baltasar already knew Teresa's secret, probably told him by his uncle even before he had allotted her to his nephew.
Wounded by the sarcasm, Teresa rose proudly and asked whether her cousin had anything further to say. Baltasar ordered her to sit and asked her to forget the unhappy suitor, for it was now her closest kinsman, sincerest friend and most determined guardian of her dignity and fortune who spoke. He said that he had known Simão well in Coimbra two years earlier and marvelled at the good faith with which an innocent girl remained fascinated by her neighbour's depravity. He invoked Simão's lowly companions, the servants beaten at the fountain and the nights in Coimbra when, drunk and armed, he had proclaimed war on nobles, kings and the religion of their fathers.
Teresa had not known some of those facts, but learning them did not distress her, because since she had known Simão she had heard of no new sorrow caused to his family. When Baltasar asked whether she was convinced that Simão owed the reform of his conduct to her love, Teresa, now irritated, replied that she neither knew nor thought about it. Her cousin then announced that he would spend his life saving her from Simão's clutches, even if her father and the protection of the law should fail her. He promised to show the bully that victory over the water carriers would not save him from being kicked out of Tadeu's house.
‘Then do you mean to govern me?’ Teresa asked with open irritation. Baltasar corrected the verb to ‘guide’ while her reason required assistance and took his leave by advising her to show good sense.
From there he went to find Tadeu and told him the substance of the conversation. Astonished by his daughter's courage and wounded in both heart and paternal rights, the old man rushed to her room intending to beat her. Baltasar restrained him, arguing that violence would worsen the crisis and might drive Teresa to run away from home. Tadeu checked his anger, reflected for several hours and then summoned his daughter, ordering her to sit beside him while he composed his voice and manner.
He said calmly that he wished to marry her to her cousin and already knew that his daughter's will opposed his own. He assured her that he would not force her, but neither would he allow her to trample paternal honour underfoot by giving her heart to the son of the house's greatest enemy. He presented himself as a man already sliding towards the grave and declared that he would descend into it more quickly if he lost the love of the daughter whom he would henceforth consider dead. At last he asked whether Teresa would hesitate to enter a convent, wait there for her father's death and only afterwards be unhappy according to her own will.
Teresa replied through tears that she would enter a convent if that was her father's will. She nevertheless asked him not to deprive himself of his daughter's company or her of paternal affection for fear that she might commit an unworthy act or disobey him where obedience was a virtue. She promised to consider herself dead to all men except her father. Tadeu heard her and made no reply.