怒斥公主 The Demon Berates the Princess
卻說那公主不知，梳妝方畢，移步前來。只見那怪怒目攢眉，咬牙切齒。那公主還陪笑臉迎道：「郎君有何事這等煩惱？」那怪咄的一聲罵道：「你這狗心賤婦，全沒人倫。我當初帶你到此，更無半點兒說話。你穿的錦，戴的金，缺少東西我去尋。四時受用，每日情深。你怎麼只想你父母，更無半點夫婦心？」却说那公主不知，梳妆方毕，移步前来。只见那怪怒目攒眉，咬牙切齿。那公主还陪笑脸迎道：「郎君有何事这等烦恼？」那怪咄的一声骂道：「你这狗心贱妇，全没人伦。我当初带你到此，更无半点儿说话。你穿的锦，戴的金，缺少东西我去寻。四时受用，每日情深。你怎么只想你父母，更无半点夫妇心？」
逐句解 Line by line
Now the princess, all unknowing, had just finished at her toilette and came stepping forward.
She has no idea, and that is the whole horror of the line. She is 不知, entirely unaware, walking in from her 梳妝 — the morning's combing, washing and making-up — while the man waiting for her has already decided to kill her.
She saw only the demon glaring wide-eyed, his brows knotted, grinding his teeth in fury.
Two four-character phrases do the work of an entire face. 怒目攢眉: eyes blazing, brows knotted. 咬牙切齒: teeth clenched and grinding — still the phrase Chinese reaches for when someone is shaking with fury. In 攢眉 the character 攢 is cuán, "to draw together," not the zǎn of hoarding money.
Even so the princess met him with a forced smile and greeted him: "My lord, what is it that vexes you so?"
She tries to smile it away. 陪笑臉 is precisely that smile — the placating, please-don't-be-angry one. 還 is hái, "even so": she smiles in spite of what she is looking at. 郎君 is a wife's fond word for her husband, and within four lines he will have thrown it back in her face.
With a snarling bark the demon cursed her: "You dog-hearted, base-born woman, utterly void of human decency!"
咄的一聲 is the bark itself, the noise that arrives before the words. Then the abuse — 狗心賤婦, dog-hearted, base-born woman — and then the charge: 全沒人倫. 人倫 is the whole Confucian architecture of who owes what to whom, parent and child, ruler and subject, husband and wife. He is accusing the woman he abducted of failing at family duty.
"When first I carried you off to this place, you had not the slightest cause for complaint."
更無半點兒說話 — "not the least little bit to be said" — means she had no ground for complaint whatever. The small 兒 in 半點兒 is the suffix, read er. He is playing the blameless provider, which would go down better if she were not being held prisoner.
"The brocade you wear, the gold you don — and whatever you wanted, I went out and fetched."
Listen to the rhythm: the tirade stops being speech and starts being chant. 你穿的錦，戴的金 — the brocade you wear, the gold you put on — drops into short matched phrases, and the next line tightens further into a strict four-and-four. Vernacular fiction does this whenever a speech heats up. It is not the same thing as the formal verse set-pieces elsewhere in the chapter, which the text announces and sets off.
"Through all four seasons you had your comforts, and every day my devotion ran deep."
四時受用: to have your comfort in all four seasons of the year. Hold on to 受用. It means "to enjoy, to have the good of" — and in the very next passage the demon will use the same word of the monk he intends to eat.
"How is it, then, that you think only of your father and mother, and have not the least heart of a wife?"
夫婦心, "the heart of husband and wife," is the one thing he has no standing whatever to demand, the marriage being an abduction. The entire speech is assembled from the vocabulary of domestic devotion and then turned around and used on the person it was supposed to protect.
The tirade works by turning the facts inside out. He is the abductor and she the captive, and yet he plays the wronged husband, itemising his own generosity — the brocade, the gold, the year-round comforts. All the force of the passage comes from that reversal of who has wronged whom.
The speech also changes shape as it heats: the prose gathers into short matched phrases and then into strict four-and-four. This is a standard resource of vernacular fiction for marking emotional pressure, and it should be kept distinct from the announced verse set-pieces — the poems and rhapsodies the text sets off with a formula — that punctuate the chapter.
Notice which words are doing the damage: 郎君, 情深, 夫婦心. Every one belongs to the language of tenderness. The "talk of parting" the princess dreads is in fact an interrogation, and the endearments are the knife.