“Well, go then,” said Mrs Brodrick with a sigh.
Sylvia went down the long room, putting one or two things in tidy order as she passed. Wilbraham was waiting for her in the little look-out place behind the hotel. The ground, dotted with great prickly-pear clumps, fell very steeply towards the water, and folds of blue hills stretched from Monte Venere towards Messina. Across a radiant sea, snow gleamed on Aspromonte. Two fishermen were coming up a narrow pathway.
“Where are we going? By the cemetery?” asked Sylvia.
Wilbraham roused himself with a start.
“That’s as good a way as any—and the end of all things,” he muttered under his breath, so that she did not hear. “But if she had heard,” he reflected bitterly, “she would not have understood.” He scarcely now took the trouble to conceal things from her, always feeling secure that she would not understand.
They went away together down stony tracks. The gate of the little burying-place was open; they could see its great bushes of scarlet geranium, and yellow daisies, and ugly staring tombs lying in sunshine. Sylvia wondered a great deal, as usual, whether people lived a long time at Taormina, whether there was a doctor, whether the children went to school. To all, Wilbraham answered impatiently that he did not know.
Every now and then, however, she was silent, which was unusual, but struck him as a relief.
They skirted the wall, fennel towering high on the other side, and turned into a small steep path running down through flowery banks and fields, sheeted with red and blue vetches.
“How funny it is to have fields like these!”
Sylvia’s remarks were above all things wanting in suggestiveness. Answers did not spring from them, but had to begin an altogether separate existence.