師兄息怒 Curb Your Anger Brother
怎麼這等不賢，替我裝幌子哩？且讓我出去。」眾怪又一齊扯住道：「師兄息怒。我問你，前邊那客是那方來的？」怎么这等不贤，替我装幌子哩？且让我出去。」众怪又一齐扯住道：「师兄息怒。我问你，前边那客是那方来的？」
逐句解 Line by line
"How can you be so ill-mannered, making a public show of me? Now let me get out there."
裝幌子 is the idiom of the passage and it is a good one. A 幌子 is the cloth sign a shop hangs outside to advertise what it sells — a wine shop's banner, a barber's pole. To 裝幌子 for somebody is to turn them into a signboard: to make a display of them, to embarrass them in public. It is still used, and it still means being made a spectacle of.
The monsters all took hold of him at once. "Elder brother, curb your anger."
扯住 is to grab and hold on — physical, not polite. Seven women physically restraining a man who is trying to walk out of a room is the point at which this scene stops being an argument. 息怒, let your anger rest, is the set formula for calming a superior, and it appears in every historical drama ever filmed.
"Let us just ask you — those guests out in front, where have they come from?"
Both 那 are nà, but they are doing different jobs: the first is demonstrative, those guests, and the second is interrogative, which quarter. Early vernacular writes both with this character where modern Chinese splits them into 那 and 哪. The question is the hinge of the whole chapter and they have had to wrestle him into a chair to ask it.
Everything turns on one question and it takes them four passages to get it out. He has interrupted, excused himself, laughed at them, lectured them and tried to leave. They grab him. And what they finally ask is not "do you know who is out there" but something far more careful: where have they come from?
That care is the tell. They already know what the guests look like — they got that from the tea boy. What they do not know is whether these are the same four, and the answer that would settle it is a place name, not a face. The women are doing detective work, and they are being methodical about it.
Meanwhile 裝幌子 deserves its moment. The image is a shop banner: you have hung me up outside like a sign for people to look at. It is the exact complaint of a man whose family has embarrassed him in front of company, in a phrase five hundred years old and still in service.