Take that!
Your mug's all bloody!
Nyah!"
Having recovered and realizing perfectly well whom he was dealing with, the officer politely (though covering his face with a handkerchief) addressed the prince, who had gotten up from the chair:
"Prince Myshkin, whose acquaintance I had the pleasure of making?"
"She's crazy!
Mad!
I assure you!" the prince replied in a trembling voice, reaching his trembling hands out to him for some reason.
"I, of course, cannot boast of being so well informed; but I do need to know your name."
He bowed his head and walked off.
The police arrived exactly five seconds after the last of the participants had gone.
However, the scandal had lasted no more than two minutes.
Some of the public got up from their chairs and left, others merely changed places; a third group was very glad of the scandal; a fourth began intensely talking and questioning.
In short, the matter ended as usual.
The orchestra started playing again.
The prince followed after the Epanchins.
If it had occurred to him or he had managed to look to the left, as he sat on the chair after being shoved away, he would have seen Aglaya, who had stopped some twenty paces from him to watch the scandalous scene and did not heed the calls of her mother and sisters, who had already moved further off.
Prince Shch., running up to her, finally persuaded her to leave quickly.
Lizaveta Prokofyevna remembered that Aglaya rejoined them in such agitation that she could hardly have heard their calls.
But exactly two minutes later, just as they entered the park, Aglaya said in her usual indifferent and capricious voice:
"I wanted to see how the comedy would end."
III
The incident at the vauxhall struck both mother and daughters almost with terror.
Alarmed and agitated, Lizaveta Prokofyevna literally all but ran with her daughters the whole way home from the vauxhall.
In her view and understanding, all too much had occurred and been revealed in this incident, so that in her head, despite all the disorder and fear, resolute thoughts were already germinating.
But everyone else also understood that something special had happened and that, perhaps fortunately, some extraordinary mystery was beginning to be revealed.
Despite the earlier assurances of Prince Shch., Evgeny Pavlovich had now been "brought into the open," exposed, uncovered, and "formally revealed as having connections with that creature."
So thought Lizaveta Prokofyevna and even her two elder daughters.
The profit of this conclusion was that still more riddles accumulated.
The girls, though inwardly somewhat indignant at their mother's exaggerated alarm and so obvious flight, did not dare to trouble her with questions in the first moments of the turmoil.
Besides that, for some reason it seemed to them that their little sister, Aglaya Ivanovna, might know more about this affair than the three of them, including the mother.
Prince Shch. was also dark as night and also very pensive.
Lizaveta Prokofyevna did not say a word to him all the way, but he seemed not to notice it.
Adelaida tried to ask him who this uncle was who had just been spoken of and what had happened in Petersburg.
But he mumbled in reply to her, with a very sour face, something very vague about some inquiries and that it was all, of course, an absurdity.
"There's no doubt of that!" Adelaida replied and did not ask him anything more.
Aglaya was somehow extraordinarily calm and only observed, on the way, that they were running much too quickly.
Once she turned and saw the prince, who was trying to catch up with them. Noticing his efforts, she smiled mockingly and did not turn to look at him anymore.
Finally, almost at their dacha, they met Ivan Fyodorovich walking towards them; he had just come from Petersburg.
At once, with the first word, he inquired about Evgeny Pavlovich.
But his spouse walked past him menacingly, without answering and without even glancing at him.
By the looks of his daughters and Prince Shch., he immediately guessed that there was a storm in the house.
But even without that, his own face reflected some extraordinary anxiety.
He at once took Prince Shch. by the arm, stopped him at the entrance, and exchanged a few words with him almost in a whisper.
By the alarmed look of the two men as they went up onto the terrace afterwards and went to Lizaveta Prokofyevna's side, one might have thought they had both heard some extraordinary news.
Gradually they all gathered in Lizaveta Prokofyevna's drawing room upstairs, and only the prince was left on the terrace.
He was sitting in the corner as if waiting for something, though he did not know why himself; it did not even occur to him to leave, seeing the turmoil in the house; it seemed he had forgotten the whole universe and was prepared to sit it out for two years in a row, wherever he might be sitting.
From time to time echoes of anxious conversation came to his ears.
He himself would have been unable to say how long he had been sitting there.
It was getting late and quite dark.