Meanwhile, the old man, locked into his room like a rat in a trap, was bending all his feeble efforts toward releasing himself.
He feared to make an outcry, for he comprehended instinctively that treachery lurked in the air of the old house, with its forbidding mistress—treachery and danger to himself and helpless Kathleen.
He sunk back helplessly upon the bed, at first shaken and unnerved by his terrible suspicions. Sweeping his hand across his brow, he muttered:
"My door was locked on the outside by design to bar me out from my child—my bonny Kathleen. What have they done to her? or what are they going to do?"
He crept cautiously to the window and pushed up the sash. Horrors! it was barred across with iron as closely as a prison; and again he fell to raving of treachery and danger.
"That woman was not Mrs. Franklyn. I did not believe at first that it could be poor Zaidee's mother. She could not have changed so much in seventeen years, I knew; yet I could not speak out then, lest I betray myself. I thought I would wait for the developments of to-morrow. Alas! it was a fatal resolve. We were decoyed here by the trick of some deadly enemy, and every moment that I remain locked up here Kathleen is in the most deadly peril. God in Heaven help me to escape, that I may succor my poor child!"
Desperate with fears for Kathleen, he threw himself against the door and shook it with all his might. The sounds rang through the house, but no one came to release him. He shrieked aloud, but no voice replied to his frantic calls.
In his misery an awful suspicion had come to him.
He remembered Kathleen's threat to Ivan Belmont, that she would send him to prison unless she received the value of her stolen diamonds.