CHAPTER XXVII—WHAT THE “BUGLE” BLEW

Jane was going to New York with Mrs. Weatherbee. For some reason not fully explained the director wished particularly to have Jane with her. The long waits and short intervals possible with such talent as was to be sought out, for the Golden Jubilee Concert of Wellington, made it imperative that Mrs. Weatherbee have with her an assistant who could do some of the waiting, if not any of the interviewing, so for that reason, ostensibly, Jane was chosen.

The reliable old car, paradoxically called the Cozy Roadster, waited at the broad stone steps, bright and early Thursday morning, and the wait even with prompt Peter at the wheel, was calculated to be of short duration with Mrs. Weatherbee as passenger.

“Good bye, Jane,” called Judith, “give my love to little old New York.”

“Oh, Janey! Here is the _Bugle_! Just out. You can read it on the train,” shouted Drusilla, thrusting a copy of the much-awaited paper into the gloved hand of Jane.

Then they were off. The three hours train ride to New York City afforded both Mrs. Weatherbee and Jane a welcome opportunity to glimpse the world outside of Wellington. Also Mrs. Weatherbee might rest, and Jane might read.

Jane could scarcely wait to fulfill the usual train formalities before running her anxious eyes over the short columns of print in search of Whispers from Wellington. There were the Breslin Breezes, and the Carlton Clatter. Yes, there it was! Wellington Whispers!

Jane read over the usual announcements. The basketball news appeared and there was the report of the Barn Swifts Extravaganza. She saw the print as a whole, but one line stood out as if entirely capitalized. It was:

“Helka Podonsky, the Mystery of the College!”

Then followed a pacifying account of Helka’s wonderful talent, and the intimation that she might be a royal personage in hiding. Jane ran her deep gray eyes over the column, and as she read they seemed to deepen, intensified with indignation, so that the fires usually hidden, now threatened to blaze outright. In sort of a panic she quickly passed the little sheet to Mrs. Weatherbee. Followed such an adjusting of glasses, and such a poring over that column, Jane need not wait to hear what the director thought of the astonishing publication. Every move indicated intense indignation. Finally Mrs. Weatherbee looked up, caught Jane’s eye and breathed deeply.

“Who could have done that?” she exclaimed in a very low voice.

“Isn’t it awful?” Jane returned.

“Have you any idea how it came—about?”

“The reporter, Miss Nevins, was with Marian Seaton at the Breslin game,” Jane answered frankly. “Of course, Marian—dislikes Helen.”

“Oh, that’s it! Well, this seems to be the final stroke. I have done everything possible, and made all sorts of allowances for Marian, because she has been handicapped by a frivolous mother, and an indulgent father. Of late when affairs at Wellington assumed a really serious turn, I felt our patience and endurance had been exhausted, and I may tell you, my dear, Miss Seaton was marked for leaving Wellington.”

“Oh, that would be too bad,” sighed the considerate Jane.

“Yes, I agree with you, but Miss Seaton has given so much annoyance. Only your own intervention more than once saved her. And this, in face of the fact that you were the most—abused victim of her idiosyncracies. But this is altogether too serious to admit of forgiveness. There’s no telling what mischief that absurd article may work.”

Jane accepted again the despised sheet, and reading the disputed “story” over more carefully, she visioned all sorts of dire calamities coming to defenceless little Helen, through this open announcement of “The Mystery of Wellington College.” It was too awful—too horrible, after all their carefully executed plans, to save her from publicity.

* * * * *

As the train sped on to New York scenes at Wellington had also shifted. Marian Seaton and Dolorez Vincez were having their inevitable reckoning.

Dolorez had sought out Marian—going so far as to lie in wait for the harassed girl, as she left the grounds for her noon trip to the postoffice.

“You have got to come in here and listen to me,” commanded the young woman, who had been posing as a young girl. She grasped the arm of Marian, the latter frightened to the point of running away. “Do you think you can leave me like this?”

“But, Dolorez,” begged Marian, “I did not promise to do anything I have not done. I got all the girls to agree to take treatments——”

“Yes, but what you should have done was to get that firey little Allen out of the way. She has spoiled everything. Now, what am I to do with all this junk,” indicating a miscellaneous collection of stuff, misnamed furniture, that glared at both girls from piles and heaps in all four corners of the disordered room.

“You seem to forget, Miss Vincez, that it is I who am really suffering from all this,” spoke Marian with prideable hauteur. “I have gotten myself all but expelled from college, I have lost every friend, and I have done something, the result of which I am afraid to—to contemplate. And now you are going to charge me with failing you!”

A scornful laugh accompanied by the shrugging of a pair of over-developed shoulders, was Marian’s answer. Dolorez was an adventurer—and Marian her latest victim!

“You are very squeamish, it seems to me for one in your place,” sneered the Brazilian. “What about your debts?”

“Oh!” gasped the overwrought Marian. “Please don’t!”

To express at least conditional pity for Marian Seaton is but human. She had made flagrant mistakes, but after all she was only a poor, neglected girl. Neglected by a foolish, frivolous mother, and variously indulged or rashly disciplined by a father, who made his money storming the business world through the medium of over-worked and underpaid employees. His blustering ill-trained nature had served him in a way with factory workers, but it was not the sort of method from which to expect success when applied to a young, good-looking and ambitious girl, his only daughter Marian. Not knowing what it was she missed in her short life, the girl, now stood confronted with a record of deceit, and debts, and school dishonor. We will not yet condemn her without at least a trial.

The two, Marian and Dolorez, had stormed and threatened, until it was clear neither could hope to obtain any satisfaction from the other, under such conflict. Marian finally broke away literally from her captor, who now stood in the doorway of the ill-fated beauty parlor, glaring after the vanishing figure, all the venomous hatred, and avengeful threats glaring from her black eyes, and striking through the ill-natured lines of her Latin features.

“You will hear from me later, my high-strung American,” she all but hissed. “I do not admit a bunch of feather-headed girls are better fighters than I.”

But Marian was running down the path, and was fortunately well out of hearing.

Within a recreation room, Judith, in Jane’s absence, became prompter and promoter of all things necessary and interesting to Jane’s adherents. Naturally, the _Bugle_ news all but disrupted the day’s program, and now, in the noon hour, Judith and her friends were devouring and discussing that astonishing article concerning Helen.

“Well, what if she is a noble,” lisped Clare Bradley, “wouldn’t that be nice?”

“Lovely, of course,” flared back Dickey Ripple. “But suppose she doesn’t want to be a noble?”

“Oh, well, then she needn’t,” finished the inconsistent blonde.

“That’s not it at all,” explained Judith. “We don’t want Helen disturbed and run after by a lot of notoriety seekers.”

“Certainly not,” agreed Drusilla. “Suppose they come down on us and ransack the place——”

“And carry you off by mistake,” Grazia could not refrain from adding.

“I always knew there was something queer about Helen,” added Minette, with undisguised banality.

“Yes, that is, she was smarter than any girl you ever met,” corrected Weasie Blair. “That was the queer part of her.”

“And that hateful reporter! Wait until she comes around here again snooping for news!” contributed Dorothy Blyden.

“Yes, just wait!” vociferated Ted Guthrie.

“At any rate,” ordered Judith. “We must see to it that every _Bugle_ is cornered on the campus. Not a line of this must by any chance come under Helen’s eyes.”

“We will raid every house and sweep up every path,” volunteered Drusilla. “I love Helen Powderly and I am going to see that she has fair play.”

“Bravo!” chorused the girls, now scattering at the call of the gong sounding the one thirty session.

Still one more scene, important to our story, is being enacted at Wellington. Helen, in her solitary room, is quivering with suppressed excitement. She has had a letter from Stanislaus—her friend and her protector. He has, at last, found she is alive, and at Wellington College. And his letter came to the girl, who is truly in hiding, through their mutual friend, Alice Mahon, a social service worker of New York City.

“Dear, dear friend!” sighed Helen happily. “How very soon I may tell my dear Jane and Judith who you are! Very soon I may throw off my cloak of disguise. I, Helka Podonsky, so long in the servitude of dishonest captors.”

Once more she read the brief note penned in Polish. How much those few precious words meant to her!

“Just a little while more,” she sighed, folding the note as if it might escape from her holding. “Just until Stanislaus comes.”

And that afternoon Helen Powderly appeared at her class, smiling and happy, all unconscious of the _Bugle_ and its baneful story.