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Simeão de Prazins had served as parish administrator for a year before the ministry and the civil governor who appointed him fell. With the restoration of the Charter, Joaquim de Vilalva, a purist Cartista, returned to power: two excellent restorations. Simeão fondly recalled the importance of that year, the respect of the conscripts and the attentions of tavern keepers who allowed gambling on their premises. He also remembered the unmarried girls who appeared pregnant and the authority with which he operated on the parish council. Grief-stricken and ill after the death of his son José, Joaquim de Vilalva resigned. The district administrator then appointed Simeão to the parish office. Feliciano thought it convenient to have authority within the household, for the greater security of his person and his capital. It was a disaster.
After the Convention of Gramido, Zeferino returned to Lamelas with some of the original legionaries. He had endured bitter trials since joining the adventurer Reinaldo MacDonell in Guimarães, when the Scotsman was descending from Marco de Canaveses towards Braga. At the barricades of Cruz da Pedra, the Baron of Casal had crushed the resistance of those wretches deceived by the foreign chieftain. Zeferino had been among the first to flee by way of Carvalho de Este, recognising the futility of the defence, and had crossed hills and valleys to Porto de Ave. From there he returned to Guimarães, where MacDonell and his staff had taken up quarters. He immediately sought Lieutenant-Colonel Cerveira Lobo, a member of the general's retinue, and was directed to the Viscount of Azenha's mansion. The Scotsman and his staff were lodged there, while Cerveira drank old brandy copiously over an abundant and undisturbed supper. Amid glittering liqueur glasses and the metal of uniforms stood Vitorino Tavares, José Maria de Abreu, the Morgado of Pé de Moura and Cerveira Lobo. With them were Sebastião de Castro, commander of the forty-two Royalist volunteers from Oliveira de Azeméis, and his brother António Carlos, the general's aide-de-camp. Colonel Abreu Freire and Bandeira of Estarreja, later a priest, completed that court of valour and drink.
It was the freezing night of 27 December 1846, and the company was drinking hard. The wine cellar of the Casa do Arco served as a heating system. Deeply flushed by the chronic drunkenness that would attend him in life and death, MacDonell digested his supper while pacing a vast drawing room. On his arm was the beautiful Dona Emília Correia Leite de Almada, a lady of the house. One might have thought that the brave septuagenarian had won a decisive battle and was adorning the laurels of Mars with Cupid's flowers. Cerveira, meanwhile, drank and recounted the exploits of his beloved Chaves dragoons, making martial gestures and spreading his legs as though mastering a rearing horse. At eleven, a comrade came in urgently summoning the quartermaster-general: a captain of the riflemen from the Pópulo battalion was asking for him.
Vitorino of Fagilde found Captain Pinho Leal in the waiting room. A note identifies him as Augusto Soares de Azevedo Barbosa de Pinho Leal, a friend of the narrator and author of Portugal Antigo e Moderno. He was then a robust and exceedingly jovial young man of thirty, whose political faith stood at the antipodes of his vigorous intelligence. He resembled a medieval poet in love with cathedrals and obsolete institutions; there were many respectable visionaries like him in the ranks of Madre-Silva. “What is it?” asked the quartermaster-general. Pinho Leal replied that they were surrounded by the Cabrais, that the pickets at Santa Luzia and the Castle had already been attacked, and that shots could be heard elsewhere. He ended by asking for instructions on what he should do.
Vitorino was overcome with terror and took the captain into the room where MacDonell walked with Dona Emília among noblemen, canons, abbots and former magistrates. Pinho repeated to the general the news he had just given the quartermaster. According to Pinho Leal's later letter, the “devil's soul” kept an impassive face and declared that it was nothing, for he had foreseen everything. MacDonell ordered the men back to quarters. The frightened lady released his arm and went to pack the trunks, while the staff compelled him to flee as well. At one in the morning, the Royalist army abandoned Guimarães and took the road to Amarante.
The attack was an invention by Pinho Leal, intended, by his own account, to save himself and the others from the slaughter he believed imminent. At dawn the next day, six hundred of Casal's soldiers would enter Guimarães, still intoxicated by the bloodshed at Braga. The letter of 10 June 1877 gives Pinho's version in a military style as picturesque as it is self-interested. In it, Pinho says that the “Scottish brute” continued carousing, indifferent to the war, as did his court. Fearing that the Cabrais would surprise and slaughter them, he exploited his position as duty officer and the presence at the council house of a reserve of one hundred men. He told only Ensign José Maria, the Morgado do Triste, part of the plan he was about to carry out. From the reserve he chose a sergeant and four soldiers of the same company, all discreet and trustworthy. They slipped out through an alley and fired their weapons at their own pickets at Santa Luzia and the Castle. At the same time, shots fired by someone on a hill north of Guimarães helped his stratagem. As arranged, the Morgado do Triste sounded the assembly and formed the reserve beneath the arches of the council house. Pinho and the five men slipped back into the town, and he inspected the reserve when many armed people had already gathered in Praça da Oliveira.
He then went to the Casa do Arco to save those men steeped in martial drink amid an idiots' pacification. He thereby postponed for a few days the meritorious death of the Scottish general, hired by Guizot with credentials from Costa Cabral.
On learning that the force would march at one on that bitterly cold night, Cerveira instructed Zeferino to buy a flagon of the finest Fockink gin. On night marches, the lieutenant-colonel carried a straw-covered flask slung over his shoulder. Zeferino helped him fill it because Cerveira, profoundly unsteady, could not even pour from the flagon accurately. The stonemason would later say that he had seen him so drunk that he immediately suspected he would fall from his horse. Cerveira claimed to feel thirty years old: he had covered thirteen leagues at a brisk trot and was not tired. Zeferino asked whether Casal would catch them before night was over and whether everything would end in another mauling like the one at Braga. Cerveira replied angrily that the general was an ass and that he and Vitorino were resolved to kill him as a traitor to Dom Miguel I.
The army set off towards Lixa, with Cerveira among the headquarters party. From time to time, MacDonell growled Spanish monosyllables at the quartermaster. Cerveira kept falling behind, tipped up the flask, gulped noisily and gave stubborn coughs. Vitorino warned him that he was drinking too much and that the heat of the gin, instead of spreading through his body, was concentrating dangerously in his head. Cerveira said that he was accustomed to it, yet complained of pain in his temples and ringing in his ears. He could scarcely move for drowsiness and would have given five thousand cruzados to be in his own bed. Lowering his stammering voice, he swore that the next day he would drive his sword to the hilt into that thieving Englishman.
Vitorino noticed his impeded speech but attributed it to drunkenness. Cerveira said that his head was spinning, that he wanted to dismount because he could no longer hold the reins, and anxiously called for Zeferino, far behind in the column. The quartermaster called an aide-de-camp to help him dismount the lieutenant-colonel. Cerveira's body folded along the horse's neck, while the animal, startled by the weight, tossed him as the pressure on the bit slackened.
As the apoplectic man began to slide, the two officers caught him in their arms, already unconscious. By the light of a match struck from a cigar, one of them saw that his face was swollen and very red. They called and shook him, but there was no sign of life, not even a stertorous rattle. They laid him on a bank of wet scrub and found no pulse; his mouth had twisted and his wide-open eyes were streaked with blood. Cerveira was dead, struck down by alcoholic apoplexy; for him the retreat had ended beside a bank of wet scrub, not in combat.
Pinho Leal wrote that, between two and three in the morning during that retreat, a man whose true name he withheld had died of a sudden apoplexy. He confessed that the memory still caused him remorse and wondered whether he might have caused the poor devil's death. He consoled himself, however, with the certainty that, even if he had been an indirect cause, he had saved many young lives, above all his own. He added that the minor nobleman could have had few years left, for, like a shoe, he was already worn leather.
Zeferino and several men from Cerveira's retinue spent the rest of the night beside the corpse of the nobleman from Quadros. In the dim winter morning light, they saw his terrifying face and tried to close his eyelids, which resisted with a leathery rigidity. The lower jaw seemed dislocated, drawing one corner of the mouth into a grimace of mockery or rending anguish. His face was now the yellow colour of clay, dampened by dew that had seeped through the cloth laid over it. His fingers were hooked and inflexible, one hand fixed like a claw in the straps of his satchel.
Zeferino said that his lieutenant-colonel must be carrying gold about his waist, but no one dared unbutton the uniform, defended by the sacred terror of death. Only one sentry, stiff with cold, proposed that they should drink the rest of the gin. Once daylight came, Zeferino went down to the church at Margaride and told the parish priest that a nobleman from Dom Miguel's army had died on the road. Drowsy and Liberal, the priest replied that he was not a gravedigger and sent him to the parish administrator. Without the delays of legal process, the local authority placed the belt and coins in the administrator's hands. He ordered a grave opened in the churchyard, and they tipped the dead man into it with a bargain-priced prayer for the departed. Labourers on their way to clear the fields put down their hoes and rested thoughtful faces upon calloused hands. When the parish administrator said that more than a conto of gold réis had been found, one of them exclaimed, “Well now! A whole conto of réis!” He then bent to his companion's ear: “Tónio, if only we had gone up the hill earlier and found the dead man...” “What a windfall!” answered the other man. These were remnants of ancient virtues: the men were composing an idyll in prose.
Zeferino accompanied the guerrilla force until soldiers from Vinhais killed the general in Trás-os-Montes. He then went with several Royalist leaders to the Junta of Porto and, when the struggle ended, returned home and handed his sword to his father. The old man welcomed him with verbal caresses: “I always told you that you were a blockhead!” He reminded his son that he had advised him not to trust the drunkard from Quadros or take the field without the Morgado of Barrimão. “Now, you utter ass, get back to building walls and take care that they do not arrest you.” Zeferino had arrested the parish administrator of Vilalva and tried to seize Feliciano, the man back from Brazil in Prazins, whose brother was now the parish administrator. And Maria Dias was going about shouting that Marta and Zeferino had killed her son; he needed to keep his eyes open.
Cutting the air with his arm and clenched fist, the stonemason protested that he would wipe out the whole breed of anyone who blocked his path. If they killed him, he would even thank them; he was, he said despondently, the most wretched man beneath the sun. For three years he had not enjoyed the least scrap of amorous satisfaction, and he swore that it would end badly. Either they would kill him or he would end on the gallows because of that girl whom the Devil had put in his path and whom he could not dislodge from there. As he said “from here”, he pinched his knotted throat between two fingers as though catching a flea.
The municipal administrators received orders to collect the military muskets that remained in village hands. Military detachments spread through the district centres to assist the authorities. Summoned to Famalicão as parish administrator, Simeão was charged with leading the military operation against Zeferino's house in Lamelas. Muskets carried home by several Miguelists had been reported there, in breach of the conditions of the Gramido protocol. Simeão understood the danger and asked to resign, but the authority harshly required him to perform his duty and refused the request.
As Zeferino declared himself indifferent to life and death, implacable fate was preparing a new disaster for him. At daybreak, after a feverish sleepless night, he dreamt that he was major-commandant of Lamelas. He was attending the parade of the Barcelos militia regiment beneath Dona Maria Pinheiro's manor house. At the Gothic window of the building from the reign of Dom Afonso IV, Dom Miguel I watched the victorious army parade. Brilliant trumpets played The King Has Come, and the troops stretched as far as Barcelinhos. In a lumbering cart, the Abbot of Calvos, dressed in pontificals, sprinkled the people with holy water while chanting the Bendito. Flag-decked boats sailed down the Cávado, carrying bands from Santiago de Antas and Ruivães playing Cana-verde and Água Leva o Regadinho. In a barge draped with red counterpanes came the sister of Father Roque, the Latin master, wearing spectacles and knitting. Beside her sat Marta in white satin and gilded red ankle boots, her hair loose like the angels in the procession of Our Lady of the Little Donkey in Braga. Zeferino stood on the bridge, absorbed in the bride coming upriver to marry him, when three blows from the handle of a hoe struck the window. He leapt from bed, dazed, and heard his neighbour warn him to escape through the garden, for soldiers were already entering Lamelas with the parish administrator.
Zeferino quickly reached the byways of a pine wood and, from behind a terrace, saw Simeão beside the escort's sergeant in front of his house. He saw the parish administrator point at the windows, heard heavy musket-butt blows against the gate, and watched soldiers invade the garden and enter through the open kitchen. At last, the escort withdrew with two men carrying loads of weapons.
The old ensign, crippled by paralysis, was deeply distressed when his son returned. The sergeant had wanted to take his sword, but relented when the old man wept and asked to be allowed to die beside it. He could no longer defend it because he was disabled, but his plea had preserved that final symbol. Zeferino quietly asked what Simeão had said. “He said nothing,” his father replied; it was he who had warned his neighbour that they were all muleteers travelling the same road.
The stonemason sat for a long time with his hands pressed into his head and his eyes fixed on the corner where two dozen muskets bought by Cerveira had stood. With forced resignation, he said that they were no longer of any use, that the war was over, and that the Devil could take everything. After a few seconds of inward anguish, he complained that Simeão had first given him his daughter and then withheld her, something one did not do to a man who shaved his face. He had led an honest life and worked as hard as he could, but passion had unhinged his mind, driven him from his trade and sent him roaming the world through cold, heat and gunfire. Now Simeão came through his door, took his weapons and, had he caught him, might have thrust a bayonet into his body. His father sensibly interrupted that none of this would have happened if he had not gone to Prazins to provoke Feliciano. Zeferino objected passionately that he was in love, with a pointed knife lodged in his breast, and that he had done the other man no harm to deserve such hatred. He concluded that, one way or another, he was lost.
He rushed out and went to Monte Córdova to speak with Patarro, an old villain who had escaped Casal's cavalry in Braga at the cost of three fingers and a nose slashed by a sabre.
On the Wednesday of the following week, market day in Famalicão, Simeão bought two pairs of oxen for the steward of Retorta. Retorta was an old estate, with a tower and the Brandão coat of arms, which Feliciano had bought from a nobleman of Afife. The business lasted well into the afternoon, and Simeão left the fair at dusk with the steward and two farmers from another parish. The farmers rode spirited mares; Simeão travelled on his old grey, an animal of mild patience and impervious to the spur. She answered the whip by tucking in her hindquarters and walking backwards, the most expressive way she could show her dislike of haste. Her owner boasted that he had fallen with her only a few times.
As they left the fair, the conversation turned to Marta. The others had heard that she had tried to kill herself because of José Dias. Simeão said that he too thought his daughter had intended to throw herself into the river, but added that she was almost well again in Caldelas. The vicar and his sister had put her mind to rights, and as soon as she was entirely recovered she would marry her uncle Feliciano. Bento of Penso asked whether the uncle wanted her. “Of course! He wishes he had her already,” Simeão replied. Begging pardon for his frankness, Bento said that people claimed Dias used to enter Marta's house at night. He himself had seen nothing, he added, but that was what people said. A man was always reluctant to marry a woman of ill repute, but it seemed that Feliciano was not a fussy eater. “He has a strong stomach, that is what it is,” confirmed Belchior of Rechousa. Simeão was not surprised by such commonplace frankness in villages still untainted by the protection of polite conventions. He nevertheless defended his daughter's honour, attributing the slanders to Zeferino's desire for revenge. Belchior reminded him that he had promised her to Zeferino for fifteen hundred mil-réis and that, according to the people, a man's word could not be withdrawn.
Simeão defended himself by saying that, on his side, it had been a joke. At that instant, three men with scarves over their faces planted the ferrules of their staffs in the road and leapt from an embankment before the riders. One of them struck Simeão on the head with a staff and knocked him down. The scarves concealed their faces, and the companions who fled provided no reliable identification of the attacker.
The two farmers dug their heels into their mares and fled like goblins from a magic comedy glimpsed in the twilight. The steward dropped the oxen's ropes and crossed walls and cornfields in a headlong flight to Famalicão. At the entrance to the town he raised the alarm against robbers, told the excited crowd what had happened and brought the authorities running. The road filled with people searching for Simeão and the band of robbers. They found Simeão alive, lying on his back and gasping, his face caked in blood that gushed out and pooled on both sides of his head. Beside him, the mare chewed tender sprigs of gorse between her teeth and bit, and coughed from her lungs with swollen flanks. Futrica, a farrier from Terra Negra, examined the wound and declared that the brain was visible and the man would not last long. He urged them to give Simeão the last rites; the “brain on view” was merely the farrier's improvised science. They requested a stretcher from the nearest farmer and promised two twelve-vintém coins to two labourers to carry him to Prazins. The steward mounted the mare to ride to Santo Tirso for Baptista, the household surgeon. Startled by the spurs on his clogs, the mare reared, sat upon her haunches and rolled sideways as though settling down to sleep. They had to haul her up while the crowd laughed shrilly at the steward as he tugged his trapped, hairy leg from beneath the animal's belly. And close by went the stretcher bearing an old man who groaned in agony and begged for confession.
As soon as the stretcher entered Prazins, Marta was told that her father was dying from blows dealt by highway robbers. Dona Teresa and the prior accompanied her to her father's house. When they arrived, the parish priest was coming out after hearing Simeão's confession, and the bell was summoning the viaticum. The signal drew towards the church a crowd stirred by anxious curiosity. Some said that robbers had attacked a farmer at Santiago de Antas; others whispered Zeferino's name. A goatherd claimed to have seen Patarro of Monte Córdova and another sinister-looking man passing towards Lamelas at dawn. Yet all declared with one voice that they had seen nothing and wanted no knowledge of misfortune, for fear of Zeferino's gang.
Simeão lay still dressed upon the bed, his face furrowed with blood, breathing anxiously and groaning in pain. The vicar had propped his head upon a thin, very long pillow folded into three, while everyone waited for the surgeon. By the dim light of a tallow candle fixed to a tin plate, Marta saw her father's bloodied face and fainted. Holding the girl in her arms, Dona Teresa exclaimed to her brother, “What a wretched house!” She ordered them to ask for lamps and water to wash away the blood. As soon as Marta regained consciousness, Teresa took her to her room, promising to call her when her father was able to see her. She wished to spare her the spectacle of his fits.
When the last rites arrived, amid the clamour of the Bendito and the measured tinkling of the bell, Marta wailed aloud and begged to say farewell to her father. A neighbour who had crowded into the bedchamber had sworn before the other women that no one but Zeferino of Lamelas had dealt the blows. That other woman's certainty drove into Marta's heart the remorseful belief that she had caused her father's death. She wanted to beg his forgiveness and implored her friend, by the wounds of Christ, to let her kneel beside her unfortunate father. Teresa restrained her, fearing another attack of mental disturbance, and asked her to wait until the dressing was complete. The surgeon wanted no one in the room except the barber who was shaving the wounded man's head.
Soon afterwards Uncle Feliciano arrived from the Retorta estate, where he was living while supervising the building work. Terrified, he told Osório that he already regretted the purchase: Portugal was a den of thieves, a band of criminals, and he would leave very soon. He then entered his niece's room and declared with a grief-stricken air that, if her father died, she should regard her uncle as a second father.
The surgeon emerged with little confidence: one blow had torn away a piece of tissue and left the skull exposed. That, and not the brain, was what the farrier from Terra Negra had seen. The haemorrhage was heavy, and a cerebral concussion was feared. After bleeding Simeão, the doctor ordered wet cloths to be applied to his head and changed every quarter of an hour. Marta and Teresa did not leave the sick man's cot for a moment. Osório spent the night in the small sitting room listening to Feliciano, who spoke at length about his niece and her former passion for José Dias. Her uncle insisted that he did not hold it against her; quite the contrary.
Towards dawn, the wounded man became deeply distressed, shuddered, talked nonsense and tried to tear the cloths from his head. He thrashed his arms and drew his daughter's tear-washed face against his chest. The priest and Feliciano hurried in, fearing that he was in his death agony. The agitation faded into restless sleep, with Simeão's head in Marta's lap as she gently adjusted the cloth over his wound. When he woke from his stupor, he recognised his daughter and thrust her away. He spoke of the stonemason who had killed him and relapsed into a comatose state; the accusation came from the wounded man, not from any reliable identification. Father Osório attributed the drowsiness to bleeding within the skull and regarded it as a sign of probable death. The surgeon returned at dawn, prescribed leeches behind the ears and told Osório that the case looked grave. That devilish sleep seemed to him a bad omen; he would visit other patients and return shortly.
Marta promised Our Lady of Health that she would circle the chapel ten times on her knees and offer her a silver halo. She also promised to fast for six months on bread and water, eat no meat for a year and walk barefoot to the miraculous Lady's pilgrimage. The promises eased her remorse a little: she believed that her father was dying because of her. Maria of Vilalva already accused her of her son's death as well: Marta saw herself as a wretched woman who had caused the deaths of both her betrothed and her father.
The wounded man entered an interval of calm wakefulness, looked at his daughter and told her that he was dying and leaving her without father or mother. Feliciano interjected that this need not trouble him, for Marta would want for nothing. She was his niece, and he had no one else in the world. Simeão stammered tearfully that he would die content if she became his brother's wife. A strange silence followed: Marta lowered her eyes, Dona Teresa looked at her brother Osório, and Osório watched Feliciano to see how his thoughts would express themselves. Feliciano, for his part, waited for the others to say something. Then her father drew Marta close with great tenderness and asked, “Will you marry your uncle, my daughter?” “It is the last request I shall ever make of you,” added the man who believed he was dying.
Under the weight of grief, remorse and the certainty that her father was about to die, Marta answered only with a gesture of assent. It was not a declaration of romantic desire but a daughter's surrender born of guilt and despair. She fell to her knees, bent over the bed and sobbing; then she screamed and slipped to the floor in convulsions. Her face was deep scarlet and her mouth was covered in foam. Dona Teresa and Osório carried her to the bedroom and laid her down, now quiet but insensible and rigid, with her mouth slightly twisted.
The surgeon arrived at that moment and asserted that the girl had inherited her mother's illness, classifying the episodes as epileptic fits. In private, he told Uncle Feliciano that the worse part of the inheritance was not epilepsy but the dementia which, in his view, had driven her mother to suicide. He alleged that Marta was weak and had been raised with the indulgences of a city girl, which in his view could spoil both body and soul. She must, he recommended, be treated with great care, spared distress, distracted and, finally, married. If another fit came, he advised vinegar for her to smell and a folded cloth between her jaws so that she would not bite her tongue. Thus pronounced the medicine available in that house, with all the confidence of its century. Feliciano retained one phrase above all and reminded Father Osório, “He said the best thing was for her to marry.”