Summary: Mrs. Lovett looks up at the man who colored her world. Based in Eric Whitacre's gorgeous choral piece "i thank You God for most this amazing day" that gave me the idea for this. Glory has returned to Eleanor Lovett's life.
i thank You God for most this amazing day
Looking up at him from her position on the old chair that evening, she might have been a woman worshiper at the feet of her god. Her lips parted in utter amazement at the figure of the man in front of her, standing straight and alive when the world had given him up for dead a lifetime ago. Much history had been made, and most of all, much suffering had been had by Eleanor Lovett.
London's acrid breath stung her lungs and eyes every day when she ventured forth into the dark, slick streets in search of the necessities. Money she had to make appear from nowhere. No one would rent the upstairs even if she had considered it. As it was she was far richer in memories than in coin.
And then he had appeared before her as if by grace, or by magic, she didn't know which, and the color abruptly returned to Eleanor Lovett's world, flooding her with sensation. No one knew it, but the widowed baker had suffered much without color. She was overwhelmed and deeply affected, and she had been alone long enough that disguising her emotions was no longer something she bothered with. Everything she felt she displayed; she could not help it. And why not? There had been no one to listen to her in a very long time.
She had almost been unable to speak, but she could not restrain herself from reaching out to him.
Now it was months later and she was standing quietly next to him in Hyde Park, the sunlight spangling their blue blanket through the waving branches of a tree. She was staring at him, and he was affecting not to notice her attention.
Her eyes roamed his face hungrily, for she never had seen a miracle until he walked into her shop. She had become so used to the wondrous cruelty of men that she had forgotten her hunger for beauty. It had returned in a flash.
The wellspring of her breathless wonder at the world was her aching heart, which had seen very little love in all its thirty-four years. She had a limitless capacity for experience, and the pale man who haunted her eaves with his deep sorrows and black rages found himself continually astonished in her presence of light and zeal. It was this, she supposed, that made him stand still and allow her to observe him with the rapt attention of a pilgrim at a shrine. Perhaps she could inspire him.
In the meantime, she was thinking how the sun had never quite shone like this before; how the light painted a swatch of glory onto his pale cheek and stole across her shoulders and neck as she moved to stand in front of him. Her eyes narrowed, taking in the idea of coming back from the dead. Sure as she was alive he was alive.
Prayer had never been a conscious activity for her; she had been told all her life that Jesus was her lord and savior and that if she was good she would rest in eternal peace with Him and His angels, and she might have eternal life.
At this very moment, her lips ghosting over the warm, living skin of the man she had enshrined in her memory as dead (and with him a piece of her heart had died too), she felt that she could pray with total certainty to a god who must exist, for he had granted her greatest prayer. The world was new again, at least for one woman.
The sky hadn't been this blue in a long time, the trees had not seemed so majestic in many years. Nor had the grass been so lush, nor had she ever been so aware of another human being as she was now. In the whole world, he had come back to her.
Eleanor Lovett had found color and glory in life again. She thought she might go mad with joy.
now the ears of my ears are awake, now the eyes of my eyes are opened.